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Jeanne Villepreux-Power was only eleven years old when her mother passed away. Just before her eighteenth birthday, Jeanne made a bold choice to follow her dream of becoming a dressmaker. She packed her few belongings and started a long journey on foot from her home in the French countryside to Paris. This trip covered more than 300 kilometers. Sadly, her cousin, who was traveling with her, attacked her on the road and stole her identity papers. Jeanne was forced to seek safety at a local convent.
With the help of local police, she secured new travel documents and continued her trip. However, when she finally arrived in Paris, the apprenticeship she had been promised was no longer available. The only job she could find was an assistant position as a seamstress. Four years later, after helping make thousands of dresses, Jeanne was assigned to create an outfit for a duchess attending a royal wedding. At the ceremony, she met and fell in love with an English merchant named James Power. She married him and moved to the harbor city of Messina on the island of Sicily. There, with the independence her new life provided, she developed a passion for science.
Since formal education was largely closed to women, she educated herself. She read passionately about geology, archaeology, and natural history. She then turned her focus to studying the island's natural environment.
Walking along the shore in her long skirts, Jeanne became fascinated by a remarkable sea creature called the argonaut, or paper nautilus. This small octopus-like animal is known for a delicate, spiral shell produced by the females. Jeanne was captivated by this mysterious and elegant life form.
The argonaut had puzzled naturalists for centuries, dating back to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. The main mystery centered on its beautiful shell. Scientists debated whether the argonaut created its own shell or if it simply found and inhabited an empty one, like a hermit crab. They wondered why only the females possessed shells. They were also confused by the shell's unusual shape, which did not seem to perfectly match the animal's body. Finally, they were amazed that the creature could completely detach from its shell yet never abandon it.
Another puzzle was how the female's shell could grow to four times its original size during her five-month reproductive period. This was an incredible feat of biological engineering not seen elsewhere in nature.
In her research notes, Jeanne Villepreux-Power wrote:
Having for several years devoted to the natural sciences the hours that remained to me free from my domestic affairs, while I was classifying some marine objects for my study, the octopus of the Argonauta transfixed my attention above the rest, because naturalists have been of such various opinions about this mollusk.
Observing argonauts in the wild was extremely difficult. The shy creatures would flee to the depths or release a cloud of ink at the slightest disturbance. Jeanne described the challenge:
When the air is serene, the sea calm, and she believes herself unobserved, the Argonauta adorns herself with her beauties... but this animal is very suspicious, and as soon as it perceives that it is being observed, it withdraws its membranes into its shell in the blink of an eye and flees.
For ten years, Jeanne made it her mission to conduct "serious research" on these creatures. She wanted to understand their physiology, reproduction, and habits. A talented self-taught artist, she carefully drew what she observed.
Unlike other naturalists, who studied dead, preserved specimens, Jeanne believed the truth could only be found by observing living animals. To overcome their shyness, she designed and built one of the world's first offshore marine research stations. She anchored a system of large cages with observation windows off the Sicilian coast. Every day, she prepared food for the argonauts, rowed her boat to the cages, and spent hours kneeling on a platform, watching them undisturbed.
However, working for long hours in cold seawater while wearing heavy skirts was impractical. To continue her work on land, Jeanne pioneered the modern aquarium. She turned her home into a marine biology laboratory, filling large tanks with living argonauts.
She conducted experiment after experiment. She used a microscope to study eggs and shell fragments. She followed her strong belief that the female argonauts created their own shells, contradicting the theories of many male scientists of her time. She wrote of her determination:
I armed myself with patience and courage, and only after several months managed to dissolve my doubts and see my research crowned with happy confirmation.
In 1833, Jeanne began a series of groundbreaking experiments. She finally solved the ancient mystery. She proved that the argonaut does indeed build its own spiral shell, and she discovered how and when it does so. Through elegant and careful observation, she provided "unequivocal proofs, that the Argonauta octopus is the builder of its shell."
Her key insight was simple yet revolutionary: you cannot understand a living creature by studying dead ones. To learn when the argonaut gets its shell, she needed to observe it from birth. She obtained three pregnant female argonauts, each carrying thousands of eggs in its enlarged shell, and waited for them to hatch. The tiny baby octopuses emerged naked, housed in a gelatinous sac.
She checked on the hatchlings every six hours, observing them closely. One day, she carefully removed a tiny, nine-millimeter-long baby from its mother. She noticed it was in a position of self-embrace, its arms wrapped around its sac. The end of the sac had begun to fold into the shape of a spiral. She gently returned the hatchling to its mother. When she checked six hours later, she was astonished. The baby octopus had already begun building its shell from a thin film, following the geometric pattern of its mother's shell. Within hours, the film thickened into the signature furrows. This was living proof that the argonaut was its own architect, starting its work almost at birth.
Her most brilliant experiment, however, revealed something no one had even thought to question. It demonstrated a form of animal intelligence that science was not yet ready to recognize.
Jeanne made a small hole in the shell of an adult female to see if and how the animal would repair itself. She watched in amazement as the octopus extended its front arms. It swept its silvery membranes—previously thought to be used only for sailing—over the hole like a windshield wiper. It then sealed the puncture with a glue-like substance. She analyzed this substance and found it was chemically identical to the calcium carbonate of the original shell. The repaired section was stronger than the surrounding shell, forming a bumpy, sideways pattern—a kind of scar.
In an even more imaginative twist, she broke a small piece from an argonaut's shell. This time, she placed fragments from other shells in the tank nearby. To her astonishment, the argonaut rushed to the pieces. It felt them with its arms, searching for a suitable shape. It then applied a fragment to its own damaged shell and began the process of welding it into place, struggling to align the furrows of the borrowed piece with its own.
She spent hours watching this staggering display of problem-solving. Previous naturalists, working only with dead specimens, had declared such a thing impossible. But after repeating her experiment for five years with the same results, Jeanne Villepreux-Power demonstrated the remarkable intelligence and adaptability of the octopus.
As a woman, Jeanne was barred from the official scientific community. She could not attend universities or present her findings at scientific societies. Her research entered the world through correspondence with sympathetic male scientists. In 1839, Sir Richard Owen, a leading English scientist before Charles Darwin, presented her findings to the London Zoological Society. Her work was a revelation. It was soon published in English, French, and German and circulated widely across Europe. By the end of her life, she was a member of more than a dozen scientific societies.
Jeanne Villepreux-Power's research did more than solve a centuries-old mystery about a shell. Through her ingenious experiments on shell repair, she laid the essential groundwork for the modern scientific study of octopus intelligence. Her work helped pave the way for our current understanding of animal consciousness, forever changing how we see the minds of other creatures.