Roland Anderson cowrites a book on one of his life's obsession: the giant Pacific octopus

How it started that Roland Anderson became one of the world's top experts on the giant Pacific octopus — the largest octopus in the world, and home here in Puget Sound — was when he worked as the night-shift biologist at the Seattle Aquarium.

That was 33 years ago.

Now, more than 200 research papers later, Anderson still never tires of telling stories about these creatures.

The giant Pacific octopus, he says, leads a life that, well, you could write a book about. So Anderson has, and his book about his life's obsession comes out in May.

Anderson is the one who can tell you about, oh, you name it.

How about: how the male octopus literally goes crazy and dies after mating. And how the female doesn't fare much better. She simply stops eating and wastes away while guarding the eggs.

As Anderson likes to say, "There's no such thing as safe sex for octopuses."

The giant Pacific octopus can weigh up to 400 pounds, and extend 28 feet from arm tip to arm tip, Anderson says. It lives about three or four years.

Its habitat ranges from Southern California all the way to Japan, but it's in the shallow Puget Sound waters that divers often come across them. The octopuses they usually spot are not the big, big guys; more like in the 40- or 50-pound range. There are several living right under the Seattle Aquarium at Pier 59.

When Anderson, 63, began working nights at the aquarium in 1977, he says, "I got the feeling they were looking at me. When I looked at them, they were looking back."

That certainly would give someone pause, especially when the octopus is irritated by something and its eyes become a dark rectangular bar.

Anderson retired last year, and has cowritten a book — "Octopus, the Ocean's Intelligent Invertebrate" — with two other authors. The introduction says:

"Octopuses are amazing animals. They can change color, texture and shape. They have three hearts pumping blue copper-based blood, and are jet powered. They can squeeze through the tiniest of cracks and disappear behind a cloud of ink ...

"They are considered by many to be the most intelligent of invertebrates.

"They have the manipulative ability to get into fishermen's crab traps, eat the crabs, and get out again ... They can even grow a new arm when one is bitten off."

Half of an octopus's nerves are in its arms, Anderson says, and that makes the arms largely self-directed.

All those nerves mean that you can cut off an arm — as researchers did in olden days before animal rights came to the forefront — and the arm will go crawling off by itself for five or 10 minutes.

If a piece of food is placed near the severed arm, "it'll try to pass the food down the arm toward where the phantom mouth used to be," Anderson says.

Through the centuries, octopuses of the giant kind, and giant squid, have been unjustly portrayed as monsters of the deep, Anderson says.

The 1869 Jules Verne novel "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea," and the 1954 Walt Disney movie version feature a giant squid (which in reality can get to a ton in size) attacking the submarine Nautilus.

"All fiction," says Anderson about murderous cephalopods.

In 2007, he was one of the authors of a paper about giant Pacific octopus attacks on divers.

"Although predators, they are generally shy and retiring animals that would rather retreat to a den than have any contact with humans," says the paper.

The paper does recount four instances of the octopuses attacking divers, although there have been no documented diver fatalities attributed to giant octopuses.

In one instance, the paper tells of divers collecting marine life on the Washington coast reporting a 15-pound octopus pulling off a diver's dry-suit glove, "causing him great aggravation as the cold water leaked up his sleeve."

The attack was "no worse than a puppy worrying a shoelace," says the paper, though pointing out that the octopus could have pulled off a diver's mask or torn the diver's suit with a bite from its beak.

Now, about the octopuses' tragic sex life.

One of the eight arms of the male octopus is a "specialized" arm with an organ at the end called the ligula. The ligula has erectile tissue and is used to transfer billions of sperm from a yard-long packet into the female through one of its two gill openings.

The actual sex act lasts more than four hours.

Then tragedy begins for the male, something called "senescence." The male stops eating, loses weight, acts disoriented, even wanders into stinging sea anemones, which he would normally avoid.

He crawls out of water onto the beach. Within two or three months, he's dead, if not already eaten by predators.

The female crawls into a cave that becomes the den for her and the eggs, which are the size of grains of rice. She weaves them into a string of chitin — that's material like your fingernails — which she hangs down from the ceiling of the den, maybe 200 strings, with 200 eggs per string.

She blocks the den with rocks for six to eight months and stays inside, never going out, never eating.

When the eggs hatch, the mother blows water on them and they drift toward the surface.

Then the mother soon dies, as if knowing that she had done her duty in keeping the species alive, Anderson says. On average, two out of 200,000 babies will survive, but that's enough to keep the population going.

"Live fast, die young," is the famous saying that Anderson likes to use to describe octopuses.

Erik Lacitis: 206-464-2237 or elacitis@seattletimes.com