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Video here.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-us-canada-50751898
That must have been one hell of a tussle.😁
They really are amazing creature aren't they?
I saw the fisticuffs octopus earlier. Incredibly intelligent creatures.
You don't mess with them though, obviously.😁
The video the OP linked too was filmed in one of our farms. The staff out there are used to seeing some pretty cool stuff, but this blew them away.
There were two theories for what happened:
The eagle saw the octopus near the surface and thought it was an easy meal
The octopus was “fishing” using one of its tentacles as bait and caught something larger than it was expecting. Apparently they are known to catch and eat smaller seabirds that way.
Either way neither participant seemed too keen on continuing the struggle. The octopus gave up pretty easily when they started to separate them, and the eagle seemed pretty relieved. I think the eagle would have lost if they had been left to it though.
The eagle will ink twice before doing that again.
RM.
Octopuses/octopodes/octopi are very intelligent, to the point that I have mixed feelings about eating them. There's a really good book by Peter Godfrey Smith on the evolution of intelligence, it looks at cephalopods as an analogue for intelligence in vertebrates. It's a compelling read; ideal for anybody stuck at home for, you know, whatever reason.
Absolutely fantastic animals. Don’t know if it is true or apocryphal but I once heard or read about fish going missing at an aquarium and the staff couldn’t figure out how or why. Turns out an octopus was letting itself out of its tank at night for a midnight snack. Really hope it’s a true story. I’d never eat one of them
I heard the same story when I used to work in zoo’s/ aquariums in the UK FunkmasterP. The version I heard was that at London Aquarium fish in the behind the scenes area were going missing and no one knew why. After installing a camera it was realized that at night the octopus would get out of its tank via a tiny space in the lid, squelch across the floor and into the other tanks, where it would eat to its hearts content before returning to its tank before the morning. It was only stopped by using astroturf around the tank as the octopus did like it. Many years back I used to keep common octopus and it’s amazing to watch their ability to open jars to eat crabs; it never took longer than a few minutes for them to realize they needed to unscrew the lid.
Don't always need to unscrew the top. Lots of octopus videos on this channel surprisingly
What I find amazing is that for such an intelligent creature they have very short life spans, typically about 2 to 3 years. Even those large pacific ones only make it to 6 years old.
If they could manage to live longer, the world might have a different all conquering species, rather than us !!
I was boat fishing once & a mate caught an octopus. It was a right laugh watching him try to chuck it back, every time he got it off one arm It grabbed the other.
I watched My Octopus Teacher on Netflix the other week, amazing film - A filmmaker forges an unusual friendship with an octopus living in a South African kelp forest, learning as the animal shares the mysteries of her world.