Honolulu Star-Advertiser © Susan Scott
August 29, 2008
Several good octopus stories came my way recently from several friends.
Mark Heckman, the Waikiki Aquarium’s director of education, e-mailed me about a Web site, zapatopi.net/treeoctopus, he thought I might enjoy. The site is about tree octopuses – and it made me laugh out loud.
The Pacific Northwest tree octopus, says the site’s creator, is an amphibious species that spends its early life and mating season in the ocean and the rest of the time in the moist trees of the Olympic Peninsula.
But there is no rest of the time. Octopuses mate once and then die.
This silly site reminded Mark of two reports he’s had of octopuses chasing people on land. The first occurred a few years ago on Maui when a man claimed an octopus jumped out of the water and chased him up the beach. The guy leaped over a low wall and escaped.
OK, he’d had a few drinks, but there was no alcohol involved in the next report. A local woman told Mark that when she was 8 or 9 years old, she stepped on a night octopus at the shoreline and it chased her up the beach, covering about 10 feet of sand.
Was she sure it was an octopus? Yes. Her uncle grabbed it, killed it and they ate it.
Mark wonders, and so do I, how an octopus, which can’t breathe air and isn’t exactly built for strolling the beach, could chase someone over dry sand. If anyone can shed light on this phenomenon, please share. Inquiring minds want to know.
While looking for information about octopus locomotion, I found several Internet stories about octopuses getting out of their seemingly secure aquarium tanks. Octopuses are able to squeeze their entire bodies through a hole the size of their eye.
The speculation as to why octopuses are such persistent escape artists is that in the wild they periodically move their dens. These aquarium pets could be searching for new homes.
Researchers at several European aquariums wondered how octopuses get around not on land but in the water. Through observation, workers recently reported the animals use their six forward tentacles for eating and the rear two for walking.
These study results have nothing to do with octopuses running on a sandy beach, but it does make you wonder about calling those eight tentacles arms, or even calling octopuses octopuses. Technically, these creatures would be bipedal hexipuses.
Over dinner a friend told me about an Internet video going around of an octopus attacking a shark. Several sites feature this film clip (search words: octopus eats shark) where a voice says it happened at the Seattle Aquarium.
I e-mailed that facility and a spokesman replied that yes, a few years ago when workers placed one of their octopuses in a large tank containing small sharks called dogfish, the sharks began disappearing at night. When biologists stayed up to watch, their suspicions were confirmed. Captured on film was the octopus attacking a shark.
So the video going around is true. Some octopuses can catch and eat some sharks.
Octopuses are unusual animals that generate countless entertaining stories. Determining fact from fiction, however, is sometimes hard. And sometimes easy. The tree octopus site says that it’s sponsored by the Wild Haggis Conservation Society.
Haggis is Scottish sausage.