Octopuses are interested in things that taste good (all those suckers actually can taste as well as cling), and different people taste different. Adam Savage is one of those people, apparently – every time he meets an octopus, he ends up with octopus hickies up to his shoulder.
So it’s possible that this diver was another one of those people whose scent/taste is really appealing to octopuses.
I’m not sure how one would find out; but I’d be fascinated to know if they treat divers as a distinct phenomenon or if they recognize them as a special case of marine mammal, some sort of atypically techie seal that tastes like sunblock.
Lovecraft was afraid of and prejudiced against literally everyone and everything. People with even slightly different skin tone from himself? Secretly monsters waiting to devour his soul, or cannibals waiting to devour him whole. Or both. People with different political opinions? Must be evil cultists out to bring about the apocalypse. People with suspiciously similar political opinions to his, or identical skin tone? Infiltrators sent by the cultists.
Air conditioning? Cold air? Demonic soul sucking monstrosity! Warm air? The very fires of hell itself must have warmed it to make way for the barbarian cannibal cultists. Just right temperature air? Clearly a trick. Check under the bed for monsters.
That thing sitting on the shelf that he can’t quite see clearly? Malignant spy device planted by mushroom monsters from the ninth planet!
The main difference between Lovecraft and other paranoid bigots is that he was good at spelling and grammar, and wrote all of his paranoid fantasies down, and sold them so that people looked at it all as bizarre and imaginative fiction, while most of the more modern ones can’t string more than three words together coherently, and the closest they get to publishing is when they post their rants on youtube where everyone can see that they’re completely unhinged. The equivalent in Lovecraft’s time would have been that person on the street corner raving incoherently about who knows what before the police took them away to a mental institution. Lovecraft was afraid of them too. (The ranters, the police, and the institutions. Also the street corners. Can’t trust corners. Dogs will eat you. Alien dogs.)
Let’s hope he never encounters one of these guys then:
The first-aid treatment for blue-ringed octopus venom is unusual: just keep doing CPR. The venom breaks down in about 45 minutes, and if you can keep oxygen pumping through the victim’s circulation, they’ll live. So even if you’re at sea and help is an hour away, you just keep doing CPR and don’t stop for at least an hour.
In our first-aid course, we were told this, then we tried doing CPR on the dummy for 5 minutes straight. It’s surprisingly hard, and we were very tired after 5 min. An hour would feel like sprinting a marathon.
But do we know that’s true? Sounds like the most metal Mythbusters episode ever!
“Adam looks a bit nervous…”
Face it - it would be Tory
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