There are lots of different days to celebrate throughout the world but this one is one of my favourites.
Octopuses are popular these days, the subjects of numerous scientific studies and books in which humans acknowledge their intelligence, consciousness, and potential to shed light on our own lives. Theses shape-shifting, eight-tentacled sea creatures now have their own dedicated World Octopus Day every Oct. 8.
It wasn’t always this way. Historically, people feared and loathed these intelligent invertebrates we’re now coming to respect.
Octopus fear dates back to the Roman Empire, at least. “No animal is more savage in causing the death of man in the water, for it struggles with him by coiling round him and it swallows him with sucker-cups and drags him asunder,” wrote Pliny the Elder in Naturalis Historia in 79 AD.
This early account set the negative tone for our views of cephalopods for centuries. For example, Pierre Denys de Montfort wrote in 1801 in Histoire Naturelle Générale et Particulière des Mollusques of a vicious octopus attack at the beach—an account later dismissed as unreliable—and provided an illustration of a creepy creature resembling the Kraken, a legendary Norse sea monster that is believed to be based on the giant squid.
The bad buzz for cephalopods culminated in the creation in 1926 of possibly the most famous and horrible octopus-inspired literary sea creature ever, Cthulhu. Classic horror writer HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu was a “monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind.”
This description, from the short story “The Call of Cthulhu,” obviously doesn’t sound like an octopus. But it captures much of what had, in the past, made humans so uncomfortable about the creatures.
“An octopus is as different from a person physically as creatures can get,” naturalist Sy Montgomery, author of the 2015 book The Soul of an Octopus. “They have no bones, three hearts, blue blood, a beak like a parrot, venom like a snakes. They can pour their baggy bodies through small openings; they can change colour and shape; they can taste with their skin.”
The evolution of humans and their fear of the octopus had changed since the days of our ancestors and the fictional writings for H.P. Lovecraft and his peers.
I'd go into all the scientific details about how octopus live, their habitat, intelligence and how they can taste with their tentacles or more correctly the suckers on their arms, but I'm a diver and photographer and any one of you can Google all of that information on your own.
I dive to explore and I live in a place where the largest octopus inhabits the waters around me. I felling love with this strange creature the first time I saw one walking across the rocky bottom of one of my local dive sites. Since then I've encounters hundreds of these amazing creatures over the years. Each encounter was different and memorable.
We as a species have so much to learn from these creatures, yes they are very smart but there is so much more to them. They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, take a minute and embrace whatever beauty you find around you and celebrate it.
Happy World Octopus Day! And thank you for reading.