Originally published at: Friendly octopus gives a hug to a human scuba diver | Boing Boing
…
octopodes are cool!
Sorry for Pinterest link…
Everyone loves Canadians.
HP Lovecraft is not known for his appreciation of different things. He was scared of Italians.
I’ve been watching a lot of Cabinet of Curiosities so this freaked me out. The back tentacles coming forward was too freaky. I’ll watch this again in a few weeks for the cuteness, but not today.
Can we really be sure the octopus is not unsuccessfully trying to open the diver?
He wasn’t too keen on Swedes, either; and they are about as white as you can get.
I wouldn’t want to put test my luck finding out if the octopus was “friendly” or “hungry”.
Yeah. Looked more like a wine tasting to me. Take a sip, spit it out (luckily!) move on to the next buffet item.
Octopods are indeed very cool, but I don’t want to anthropomorphise them.
The diver really kept their cool! Chilled Chardonnay is my guess. (Canada, and all.)
“Hey, Jim. Look. It’s a few of those hairless monkeys from above the surface. They love hugs. Here, watch this…”
*** hug, hug, hug, hug ***
(Four times the hug cuz they have eight arms)
In my scuba days in Vancouver, I only ever got a look at octopus, never a hug. But friends got hugs. Octopus are really curious and will investigate, and they rarely get to touch warm-bodied things. We’re really weird and interesting to them.
They might be hungry and seeing if we’re food, but a) I never heard of people getting nibbled, and b) we’re a lot bigger than the things they like to eat.
Gotta say the headline made me think of nothing else so much as old Popeye cartoons.
Ice wine!
Unless it’s some really oddball model that lacks a beak I think we can be fairly sure that its intentions were friendly, or at least neutrally inquisitive.
The biomechanics of having a brutal biting structure without a skeleton to anchor it are nontrivial; but ye octopodes are clever like that.
He ate kelp instead of spinach that day.
It’s possible that octopi are more interested in humans than in other octopi, unlike us, they are not a social species.
“Bug off, Jim, this my ape-hugging patch!”
This book was fascinating and really explored the mind of the cephalopod. Some of them are more social than others.