The day will come when every man, woman, and child will have to answer the question:
Do you accept your octopus overlords?
Today’s Moment of Science… the octopodes exodus from the sea.
Octopuses (or octopi… or octopodes, if you’re gonna get super fucking neurotic about it, which I am) are from the same class of critters as squids and cuttlefish. Every last one of them is venomous, but very few of them have venom that’s potentially lethal to humans. The eight tentacled buggers are known to have a complex nervous system, being one of the most intelligent invertebrates known to man. They’re gill breathers, meaning they need to stay in the water to breathe most of the time. Leaving the water for an extended period is kinda like an exercise in holding their breath.
So it was a bit strange that day that a bunch of octopuses just walked the fuck out of the ocean and onto the Welsh beach.
In October 2017, about twenty-five curled octopuses (also known as the horned octopus) were found just taking a meander around the shore at New Quay beach in Wales several nights in a row. Though many were able to be returned safely to the water, some died before making it back to sea.
Locals and marine life experts were without explanation. It’s not a species that typically comes to shore for any particular reason. Nothing major happened that caused other local sea life to yeet themselves onto the shore to their own detriment, so what’s up, you zany cephalopods?
A handful of theories have been offered. Stranded like whales? Unlikely. They don’t navigate the same way as whales, and the octopuses came back a few nights in a row, which seems to indicate something other than a messed up GPS. Looking for food? One explanation was that a boom in the octopus population due to overfishing of some of their natural predators led them to search for food inland. However, the shoreline is not the typical habitat for this species of octopus. It would have been more typical to go deeper for food rather than crawl to the local crab shack.
What, then, are some explanations that don’t seem as easily ruled out? There had been a few recent tropical storms. It’s been suggested that the consortium of octopuses had either been swept inland or injured in the storm, possibly susceptible to issues from major changes in atmospheric pressure. One of the more interesting explanations is that these octopuses were senile. Their behavior can take a sharp nosedive for the strange towards the end of their life.
If going a bit senile means taking one final stroll on the beach, you do you, my octopodes overlords.
This has been your daily Moment of Science, with the strangest craving for calamari.
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