The Octopus Whisperer | vancouver sun

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Krystal Janicki’s first octopus was exactly how she had imagined it: “weird, slimy, disgusting, evil, sinister.”

Janicki was on his 60th dive, exploring a shipwreck off the coast of Vancouver Island when his dive buddy gave him the signal: a fist over waving fingers. The octopus on the prowl.

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He had heard of masks being torn off, regulators torn from mouths, and entire ships dragged to the bottom, according to seafaring tradition.

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“I lost all my buoyancy, all my breathing control. “I was a disaster,” Janicki said.

But when the octopus extended his arm and reached out to his diving partner in a sincere, curious, kind and gentle gesture, his fear dissolved.

“I knew I had to learn everything I could about them,” Janicki said. Over the next nine years she spent thousands of hours submerged in the waters of Vancouver Island meeting the creatures he once feared. Among other divers, Janicki became known as the Octopus Whisperer.

Now, the extraordinary relationships he developed with these creatures have been captured by Vancouver Island cinematographer Maxwel Hohn for a National Geographic documentary series, Secrets of the Octopus.

Hohn and Janicki joined an international team, hired by SeaLight Pictures, for the multi-country production to capture the secret lives of different octopus species, including the giant Pacific octopus, the largest in the world.

The crew, from Australia, quickly realized that they were out of their element in Canadian waters and were not used to the dramatic intertidal currents, depths of almost 2,000 meters and cold water. They turned to Hohn.

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“Filming aquatic animals takes a lot of time. You can’t dictate what wildlife does. We had to try to find an octopus that was camera-ready; some are nervous, skittish or shy,” Hohn said.

Finding the octopus was a challenge: they change burrows frequently and are experts at hiding. Janicki has a sixth sense when an octopus is nearby.

When you find a den (a pile of cockle shells or broken crab shells are a sure sign of messy eating), you get goosebumps. He breathes slowly, lowers the dive light, stands at arm’s length, and waits, motionless, for up to 70 minutes.

She talks to them silently, tells them they are beautiful, explains what she is doing, and waits to look into their eyes.

“If the octopus wants an encounter, it reaches out and touches me, my mask, my cheek, my hand, my diving flashlight. I will slowly approach and introduce myself while two, three or four arms reach out to explore me.”

The octopus is tasting it, processing information, getting to know it. If they like it, they will show you around. “They start walking out, looking at me, like, ‘Are you coming?’, moving along rock walls, reefs, their hunting grounds, and then they head back home,” Janicki said.

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It’s almost as if they are speaking to you through their gestures.

It took several dives before Janicki, Hahn and their team found the octopus that was camera-ready and willing to participate in their session.

The den was under an old tire, next to a forest of kelp. “I relaxed, turned off the light, reached out and let the octopus make eye contact. We clicked and the game started.”

The octopus came out and began exploring it (at one point it even sat on Hahn’s head) before leading them to a beautiful reef where the sun was shining through the water. “It was like we had been together our whole lives,” Janicki said.

It’s almost as if they are speaking to you through their gestures.

Janicki said he wants to learn to be more like an octopus, with its eight arms, nine brains and three hearts.

“I want to be brilliant, to be creative, to be able to live with others, but also alone, to be still, to create environments from nothing and turn them into homes.”

Secrets of the Octopus is now streaming on Disney+ in Canada

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