Octopus Walks on Land, Stuns Onlookers (VIDEO)
An octopus has been captured on video trying to walk on land. A family filmed the Eastern Pacific Red Octopus “walking” through the seaweed next to a tide pool at Fitzgerald Marine Reserve, 20 miles outside of San Francisco, California.
An octopus walking on land is not unusual but it is rare to catch them on video, say researchers.
According to an article on Orion Magazine, researcher Alexa Warburton wrote: “Octopuses in captivity actually escape their watery enclosures with alarming frequency.
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“While on the move, they have been discovered on carpets, along bookshelves, in a teapot, and inside the aquarium tanks of other fish – upon whom they have usually been dining.”
The octopus was filmed outside of the water for about two minutes. He walked around and spit out a half-eaten crab before returning to a tide pool.
Julian Finn, a senior curator of marine invertebrates at the Museum Victoria in Australia told the Scientific American: “Crawling along out of water is not uncommon for species of octopus that live in the intertidal or near shore… many octopus species emerge to hunt in the pools of water left behind by the receding tide… Octopuses often carry prey items when foraging, returning to their lairs to consume them. It is possible that the octopus in the video was either finished consuming the contents of the crab or was too tired to continue carrying it on land.”
