College Digital Media Producer Ben Savard ’14 achieved Internet fame after a photo of himself taken by an octopus was featured on the front page of Reddit, a popular entertainment, news and social networking site. The photo of Savard dressed in a white lab coat rapidly circulated the Internet and credited its photographer, Middlebury’s female California Two-Spot Octopus.
Before the photo was taken, Savard was working on a video about the College’s science departments and decided to feature the neuroscience research of Aly Fassett-Carman ’15. Fassett-Carman was observing whether octopi could be trained to open a puzzle box with food after firstly watching another octopus demonstrate. Savard prepared to record the experiment by inserting a GoPro camera with an automatic shutter inside the aquarium containing the octopus.
“[The octopi] grab everything we put in there,” Fassett-Carman said.
According to her, octopi are naturally curious creatures. It therefore came as no surprise to Fasset-Carman when the octopus immediately reached for the camera when it was placed in the tank. In doing so, the octopus happened to direct the lens towards Savard and capture several photos.
“It was all very circumstantial,” Savard said.
The photos captured the progression from the moment the octopus grabbed the camera to when it directed the camera toward Savard. It was not until Savard was sifting through the footage the following day that he discovered the octopus’ photos and decided to post them on Reddit.
“Reddit is a website I’ve been on for a while. I know the format, I know how to make [posts] appealing to people. I wanted everyone to see [the photos], and it’s cool if people hopefully attract some attention to the sciences at Middlebury,” Savard said.
On March 10, the post garnered more than 2.2 million views on Reddit, and that number has since risen to over 3.3 million. The image has reached popularity among the site’s users, with several comparing the image to a ’90s alternative rock album and a “promo shot for an educational TV show.”
The post has also been featured on news outlets such as The Washington Post, The Daily Mail and NBC News. To quell speculation from skeptics who believed the photos were fake, Savard created and shared a graphics interchange format (GIF) image of the entire photo series.
Despite his internet fame, Savard has been careful to credit Fassett-Carman’s research for the photos.
Savard said, “I am not the story, I am hopefully just there to tell a good story. I don’t want to be the researcher, I want to be the GoPro, I want to capture things in a cool way and make sure that research like [Fasset-Carmans’] isn’t unnoticed or unappreciated...I was here for four years and I’m realizing now there’s so many different aspects of Middlebury that I didn’t appreciate, and most of that is based around the work the students are doing.”
