Octlantis is not in any sense a city. It is not a cooperatively built and maintained structure, designed to allow many individuals to live in close quarters. It is an unusually dense collection of individual dens, most of them dug into a bed of scallop shells.

The shells are remains, we think, of scallops brought in by individual octopuses as food. The shells accumulate over time, and provide a better den-building material than the silty sand of the bay. As more shells are brought in, more octopuses can build viable dens at the site, and those bring in still more shells. There are a lot of fairly complicated behaviors at the site – lots of probing, displaying, and what often looks like a monitoring of who is around. We are presently trying to work out some of these behaviors. Octlantis is a remarkable site, but it’s not an octopus city.