So, I’m at this dinner party last week—you know, the kind where you’re three glasses in and suddenly everyone’s pitching their “unique” job titles. This guy in a tweed blazer says he’s a “digital nomad consultant,” and I swear my eyes glazed over. Then, quiet Malika from the corner of the table speaks up.
“I teach octopuses to open jars,” she says, without a hint of irony. Dead silence. Then everyone leaned in, myself included, because that’s the kind of sentence that rewires your brain. And that, my friends, is where our story about Malika’s living really begins.
The Real Deal (No, She’s Not an Octopus Whisperer)
Okay, breathe. Malika doesn’t literally teach cephalopods—though I’m 100% convinced she could if she wanted to. She’s a marine biologist and a behavioral ecologist, which is just a fancy way of saying she watches animals do weird stuff and asks “why?” Her specialty? Problem-solving in invertebrates. Think: how a cuttlefish figures out a maze, or why a shrimp might use a tool. (Wait, shrimp can use tools? I know, right?)
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Her official title at the lab is “Research Associate,” but that’s boring. In reality, Malika designs experiments where octopuses have to unlock boxes, unscrew lids, or—yes—open jars to get a crab snack. She does this for a living. And she gets paid. In money. Not in squid ink, although she probably gets some of that on her jeans, too.
The Part Where She Screws Up (Because Science Is Messy)
“The first time I tried the jar experiment, the octopus just stared at me for twenty minutes,” she told me, sipping her wine. “Then it squirted water right into my face.” Classic octopus move. Malika didn’t get mad. She just switched to a blue jar instead of a red one, because the octopus was clearly offended by the color. (And science says yes, they have color preferences. Who knew?)
What Does Malika Haqq Do for a Living? She Was in Movies Before Kim
Her job is 90% failure and 10% watching an eight-armed genius solve a puzzle while you scream “YES!” into a waterproof notepad. She spends mornings scrubbing saltwater tanks and afternoons filming hours of tentacle footage. The glamour, honestly, is overrated—but the endorphin hit when an octopus correctly identifies a shape? She says it’s better than caffeine.
Wait, Does This Pay the Rent?
I asked her straight up: “Malika, how do you afford this? Like, the rent, the avocado toast, the… gear?” She laughed. She’s funded by a mix of a university grant and a nonprofit that studies animal cognition. It’s not billionaire money—more like “I have to decide between a new raincoat or a good bottle of gin” money. But here’s the kicker: she loves it. She once spent eight hours in a wet lab just watching a squid change color patterns. Eight. Hours. And she called it “a great day.”
Side note: she also freelances as a consultant for a aquarium design company. They pay her to figure out if the new octopus enclosure is “interesting enough”—because if the animal gets bored, it stops eating. So yeah, Malika’s job is literally to make an octopus’s life less boring. I want her to design my apartment.
What does Khloe Kardashian's BFF Malika Haqq do for a living?
The Unspoken Weirdness Of Her Days
You want a typical Tuesday for Malika? She wakes up at 6:30 AM, drinks black coffee, and checks her “tank cams” from bed. Then she goes to the lab, where she might use a laser pointer to see if a cuttlefish can track a moving dot. (Spoiler: yes, and it gets pissed if you lose the dot.) She takes notes like a detective: “Subject 47: ignored green light, attacked blue light. Possible color-grudge.”
And here’s the part that gets me: she’s not just doing this for kicks. Her research has real-world applications—like designing smarter AI algorithms inspired by how octopuses distribute decision-making across their arms. You’re welcome, future robot overlords. Also, she’s helping us understand how brains (with no central “brain” like ours) can still solve complex problems. That’s huge, and it happens between scrubbing algae off a glass tank.
What Does Malika Haqq Do for a Living? She Was in Movies Before Kim
So, What Does Malika Do For A Living?
On paper? She studies cephalopod cognition. In reality? She’s a translator between humans and rubbery, shape-shifting aliens that happen to live in the sea. She’s a dreamer who gets paid to ask “what if?” and a nerd who keeps an octopus’s favorite toy (a purple plastic star) in her desk drawer.
And when people ask her at parties, she just smiles and says she “teaches octopuses to open jars.” It’s simpler than the truth. But the truth—the grant writing, the wet socks, the moment an eight-brained creature solves a puzzle you built—is way more magical. Malika gets to witness magic every day. And she called it normal. If that’s not a flex, I don’t know what is.
P.S. — She also has a side hustle: naming her lab’s new baby cuttlefish. Last one was “Squilliam.” This is the life I aspire to.
