According to three-time octopus wrestling champ Gary Keffler, giant Pacific octopuses get a bad rap. As he told The Seattle Times, “People always hear these awful stories about them, killers of the deep. The ones we have here are pretty laid-back.”
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
But the dolphins are all phonies – they seem nice enough at first
But they pretend to be your friend until they see you at your worst
and then they leave you
without a word, they swim away
I have to admit, I was hoping for a video :(
Ivar Haglund, a Seattle legend, was known for octupus wrestling, among many other things!
re 1:
but dolphins are so altruistic; the ocean’s rescuers en masse, they are always pushing drowning persons to shore (“cuz they don’t want our corpses in the water where they swim”, cynical me says).
But dolphins as rescuers is such a clear example of “confirmation bias”. Just follow such a rescue story with the observation that all the non-swimmers that were not pushed back to shore, drowned; and were never heard from again.
slithey tove, yup. Slaves in the mackerel mines, no doubt!
re me@4:
[gee I’m stuck on my fantasy]
In rebuttal to my “confirmation bias” theory: They NEVER push corpses to the beach (to get those stinky corpses out of their playful waters). They ONLY rescue living people who can’t swim, so therefore, they gots to know who is having trouble swimming and altruistically, drag them to the beach. QED
What about the people the dolphins actually drown.
Nobody hears about them, right?
I work at UW Tacoma, and next time a student asks me what topic they should use for their paper, I’m pointing them to this.
We have big dolphins in our waters as well. I wouldn’t want to wrestle one, however.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_whale
Applied octopus wrestling: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/20/magazine/the-octopus-that-almost-ate-seattle.html
Spoilers: it does not end well for the octopus.
I remember reading as a child a comic book (possibly Richie Rich) that had a short story in the middle about a diver’s struggle with and narrow escape from a vicious octopus. Even then, I thought, “WTF? An octopus isn’t a vicious creature.”
If I were a dolphin I would drown humans. I’d keep some shark jaws stashed away and then drag one of the jaws across the victim so that the teeth would become embedded in the human so people would think a shark did it. One less human polluting the ocean and sky. Dolphins should be at war with humans.
But back to the quote from “I Crush Everything” in the first comment: Do most of y’all agree that the song isn’t about a giant squid at all? It’s clearly about an acute severe depressive episode.
@11: I blame Jules Verne.
@10 anym: That article about the octopus wrestler was pretty messed up. The message is clear: if a species isn’t endangered or threatened, and you aren’t a vegetarian, then shut up about how it’s harvested.
However, as a vegetarian, I take away a different moral. That guy was messed up.
@NitricAcid #11:
Is it possible that you have a slightly mangled memory of the original Ian Fleming short story “Octopussy”? The diver doesn’t escape in the end, but it’s the only thing I’ve ever read which ever mentioned that an octopus could be a threat to a diver, and according to wikipedia, it was adapted as a comic at one point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopussy_and_The_Living_Daylights