Originally published at: Friendly octopus gives a hug to a human scuba diver | Boing Boing
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octopodes are cool!
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Sorry for Pinterest link…
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Everyone loves Canadians.
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HP Lovecraft is not known for his appreciation of different things. He was scared of Italians.
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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.
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Indeed they are!
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Can we really be sure the octopus is not unsuccessfully trying to open the diver?
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He wasn’t too keen on Swedes, either; and they are about as white as you can get.
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I wouldn’t want to put test my luck finding out if the octopus was “friendly” or “hungry”.
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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.)
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“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)
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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.
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Gotta say the headline made me think of nothing else so much as old Popeye cartoons.
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Ice wine!
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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.
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He ate kelp instead of spinach that day.
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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!”
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This book was fascinating and really explored the mind of the cephalopod. Some of them are more social than others.
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