Aquarium: How Jeannette Power Invented Aquariums to Observe Marine Life

In 1818, Jeannette Power, a young French woman moved to Sicily and fell in love with the Mediterranean Sea and the Argonauta Argo octopus, the weirdest octopus on Earth.

 

Amazing weird fact: The Argonaut octopus creates a delicate shell for itself which it uses to travel up and down in the water and as a safe place to raise its young.

 

At the time, though, the only way to study a marine animal was if it was dead on land. That wasn’t good enough. Jeannette wanted to study this creature alive. She had many questions: did it create its own shell, how did it reproduce, what did it eat, and did it know she was watching? She knew that careful observation was the only way to answer her questions.

           Follow French scientist Jeannette Power on her quest for answers about one of the most mysterious marine animals on Earth.