Octopus

It pours itself into a crack in the rock, eight arms folding away one at a time, and then the stone just looks like stone again. Blink and you would never know it was there. That is the giant Pacific octopus, one of the cleverest animals in the sea and one of the biggest octopuses anywhere.

It changes the colour and the very texture of its skin in a fraction of a second, smooth to bumpy, pale to deep red, until it disappears against the reef. Most of its thinking does not even happen in its head. Two-thirds of its nerves sit in its arms, so each arm can taste and reach and work out a problem on its own while the rest of the animal is busy with something else. It is, by any measure, a strange and brilliant thing.

In the art it turns up as a being known for intelligence and for finding a way through, and you can read it in the form itself, the long curling arms, the suckers in tidy rows, the big steady eyes. An animal that adapts, that solves the room, that changes shape to meet the moment.

Clever, careful, never quite where you expected it to be. The kind of creature that is gone before you have finished looking at it.