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October 17, 2013
The Octopus That Almost Ate Seattle
It slipped slimily between his fingers, its suckers feeling and tasting his hand. He reached for it again, and again it retreated. Able to squeeze its body through a space as small as a lemon, the octopus was unlikely to succumb to his grip. He poked it with his finger and watched it turn brighter shades of red, until finally, it sprang forward and revealed itself to be a nine-foot wheel charging through the water.The octopus grabbed Mayer where it could, encircling his thigh, spiraling his torso,
its some 1,600 suckers — varying in size from a peppercorn to a pepper mill — latching onto his wet suit and face. It pulled Mayer’s regulator out of his mouth. His adrenaline rising, he punched the creature, and began a wrestling match that would last 25 minutes. - - - NYTimes.comHT Steve Sailer: iSteve
Posted by gerardvanderleun at October 17, 2013 10:42 PM. This is an entry on the sideblog of American Digest: Check it out.
Your Say
I've seen one of those in the Seattle Aquarium, they are scary huge. I wouldn't care to fight one of those monsters for 25 seconds let alone minutes.
Posted by: Christopher Taylor at October 17, 2013 5:06 PM
Back in Florida I used to keep salt water tanks as a hobby. On a local dive trip I found an abandoned crab pot with an octopus for a resident.
Brought it home and put it in a tank.
They are stupidly strong for their size - mine couldn't have weighed two pounds and I still had to replace the lid with a piece of 3/4" ply weighted down with cinder blocks.
They are incredible hunters, each morning something else was missing from the tank until nothing was left but live rock.
Their eye sight is impressive - they spend as much time watching you as you do them.
They are real particular about the tank furnishings, and will arrange them to their liking. Try to re-organize and they'll put it all right back where they want it.
They spawn once and then die. You come home to find a tank full of a milky cloud that has defeated your protein skimmer and entire filtration system, and a dead octopus on the bottom.
Once was enough.
Posted by: ThomasD at October 17, 2013 5:42 PM
I suspect nobody's commented yet who read the NYT piece; it's not really about the octopus, it's about the blind hypocrisy of Seattle foodies.
The odds are astronomical that any one of the epicures among the Save The Octopus crowd wasn't a Volvo-driving, moral-equivalency embracing, university-educated, COEXIST bumpersticker-sporting, Obama-blinded tendentious upper-middle-class twit.
Their delicious frisson of righteous indignation was merely another opportunity to display that they are, after all, Better Than You.
You troglodyte.
How dare anybody provide food for the hipnoscenti without begging the indulgence of their moral superiors who after all only ate it?
The point of this whole exercise is that the New York Times, yet, employs somebody who could dimly recognize the internal inconsistencies in the position of the planet-savers. That's the news.
Posted by: Rob De Witt at October 17, 2013 7:14 PM
And who will mourn the death a creature in its own environment who was fought and killed by an intruder just for sport?
Posted by: tripletap at October 18, 2013 5:24 AM
Half of Seattle.
Posted by: Christopher Taylor at October 18, 2013 7:39 AM
From the article:
"The octopus didn’t need to be saved, Plunkett’s team determined; the people of Seattle simply wanted to save it."
Everything the kid did was legal. Fully permitted. People just went apeshit because he was drivin' one of them American pickup trucks and punching their dinner in the face.
I live in the neighborhood where this happened. These people are friggin strange.
Posted by: Andy at October 18, 2013 7:41 AM
So it's about food, huh? I thought it was about the leader of the Seattle dope selling gangs.
Posted by: Peccable at October 18, 2013 7:53 AM
Yes Rob, that may have been the focus of the article, which was classic NYT dog-bites-man.
The excerpts chosen had almost nothing to do with that, and were more about the wonders of octopi in general.
It's not all politics.
Posted by: ThomasD at October 18, 2013 9:37 AM
Octopus wrestling would make great reality TV. (Although the Japanese may already have something like this)
Posted by: SteveS at October 18, 2013 4:31 PM
Who the fuck eats octopus?
Posted by: Daphne at October 19, 2013 9:19 PM