AS WAVES lapped at the boat, Jeanne Villepreux-Power adjusted her heavy dress. She’d been there for 3 hours, trying not to startle the small, shelled octopus in its underwater cage. She was about to give up, when the argonaut suddenly stretched out a tentacle. It picked up a piece of shell, placed it over the hole she had made in its own shell, then threw it away. Over the next few minutes it sifted through several pieces until it found a patch the right size, then bonded it in place.
Elated, Villepreux-Power knew she had witnessed something no one had seen before. She was on the verge of solving a 2000-year-old mystery: did the argonaut produce its own shell – or steal it, as a hermit crab does?
No one taught Villepreux-Power how to do experiments, or educated her in natural history. Born in 1794, she was the child of a shoemaker. Yet she became a noted marine biologist, her work celebrated by great men of the day. She invented what we now know as the aquarium and was an early pioneer of aquaculture – achievements that seem even more unlikely given that she grew up far from any coastline, in Juillac, France.
Advertisement
When she was old enough to work, she went to Paris and became a seamstress. There, after attracting attention for embroidering the dress for a royal wedding, she met the wealthy English merchant James Power. They married, and settled in the busy Sicilian port of Messina. It was a new world to Villepreux-Power and she was captivated. She decided to learn all she could about its flora and fauna.
She walked the length and breadth of the island, gathering what she could carry home and sketching what she could not. Fishers began to keep unusual animals for her to collect on her daily trips to the port. She even chartered a boat to catch marine life herself.
Word of Lady Power and her house of curiosities began to spread. Scientists at the nearby Gioenia Academy in Catania came to see her impressive collection of insects, and jars of preserved fish and molluscs. They seemed alive thanks to the embalming fluid, made to her own recipe, that maintained the bright colours.
The scientists admired her paintings, while behind them two tame beech martens ran up and down a tree she had brought inside. Most entrancing of all were the sea creatures swimming around in glass containers. She had devised the containers for her laboratory so she could more easily study marine life – they were the first recognisable aquariums.
Villepreux-Power watched starfish and mussels, sea snails and seahorses. She was one of the first to record an octopus using a stone tool to open a fan mussel. She proposed raising fish in underwater cages to restock overfished rivers – the first hint of aquaculture. But it was the argonaut that really fired her curiosity.
The argonaut is a strange animal. Like all octopuses, it is a mollusc – but it is the only genus with a shell. And the only mollusc that can leave its shell: it can come and go as it pleases – just like hermit crabs. That suggests argonauts acquire shells abandoned by other animals. But Villepreux-Power wasn’t so sure.
Membranes on two of an argonaut’s arms stretch neatly over the shell, and suckers correspond exactly with shell ridges, making animal and shell seem of a piece. Reading through the latest scientific papers, she found that argument raged over the shell’s source. “It occurred to me that the absence of experiments alone was the cause of such conflicting opinions,” she wrote. What’s more, she was in the perfect position to investigate – the Strait of Messina teemed with argonauts.
Villepreux-Power collected argonaut eggs and watched through a microscope as they grew, preserving each stage in her embalming fluid. Her work paid off: she found that a few days after they hatched, tiny shells appeared.
The experiment in the boat clinched the argument. She saw that the argonaut could patch its shell by secreting a liquid from the arm membranes, and realised that these membranes were how it made its shell in the first place. Aristotle had written about the membranes 2000 years earlier, taking them for sails. This gave the argonaut its evocative name, but Villepreux-Power was the first to spot their true use.
Her work was published by the Gioenia Academy in 1837, its members heaping praise on the “genius, patience and perseverance” of the “most beautiful ornament of Messina”. She became the first female member of the academy, and had a deep-water fish named after her: Vinciguerria poweriae.
She corresponded with scientists across Europe, including the famed naturalist Richard Owen, already known for his work on marine invertebrates. Convinced she had solved the argonaut question, Owen gave a presentation at the Zoological Society of London, which Villepreux-Power attended.
She was lucky that Owen, at least, was able to view her work impartially. She had brought with her 20 specimens showing the formation of the shell, and fractured shells in different stages of repair. She provided a wealth of other evidence based on 10 years of observation and experiment. But the conclusions of a woman – and a self-taught one at that – were not so easily believed: “Fortunately it happens that some of the more important facts bearing upon the question… do not rest upon her individual testimony as the sole authority for their existence,” ran an editorial in the Magazine of Natural History.
“Word began to spread around Sicily of Lady Power and her house of curiosities”
The men of the Zoological Society were no fools, however. After the meeting, Villepreux-Power excitedly wrote to the Gioenia Academy describing the “unanimous” applause her work had received and the proposal to make her a correspondent member. In total, she became a rare female member of 16 scientific institutions across Europe.
Still, prejudice meant that another potential breakthrough was dismissed. Villepreux-Power had noticed that all argonauts appeared to be egg-producing females. Where were the males? She spotted that some shells contained what looked like a small arm, complete with suckers, and thought it might be related to the missing males. But the scientists knew better: it was a known parasitic worm, they said. Her observations were “evidently inaccurate” and a result of “her want of physiological knowledge”. In fact, she was on the right track: we now know the male is far smaller than the female, and transfers sperm via a modified, detachable arm.
Villepreux-Power’s experiments ended when she left Sicily for Paris in 1842. But she continued to produce important work, including a beautifully illustrated travel guide to Sicily that was celebrated by Sicilians as giving the island its rightful status in Europe. She even published a paper on meteorites when she was 73.
But widespread recognition of her invention never came. A craze for aquariums swept England after the opening of the first public aquarium in 1853, but their origin was credited elsewhere. Villepreux-Power appealed to Owen for help and he duly obliged, calling her the “mother of aquariophily” in an entry on molluscs for the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Villepreux-Power died in Juillac in 1871. She was quickly forgotten; though if the ship transporting her wonderful collection had not sunk in 1838 perhaps her work would be better known. But her greatest legacy can still be seen in the fish tanks and aquariums that bring the underwater world to the surface for all to see.
This article appeared in print under the headline “The lady and the argonauts”
