The Octopus and Us

Hollywood was right!

Although not the reasoning. The reasoning was completely flawed. But that's not really important.

What the important thing is that Hollywood was correct when it first started to assert that we, the human race, should fear the octopus.

Yeah, that's right.

The octopus depicted by Hollywood we need not fear. The Hollywood octopus is nothing more than an oversized mindless beast of destruction. The exact opposite of the real world octopus.

Well, maybe not the oversized bit. I'm not entirely sure just how big Octopie can get ... I'm sure Hollywood is onto something with the massive size of their octopie.

But I'm rambling now.

We are right to fear the octopus.

And fear it we must!

Fear it!

I don't know if you know this or not, but octopie (that's correct, isn't it? Too bad if it's not, I guess) have nine brains. Nine! That's eight more than you and me combined!

(An octopus wouldn't have needed me to point that out.)

And you know that anything with that many brains has to be way, way, waaaaay smart.

An octopus has no trouble opening jam jars.

Jam jars are not something that naturally occur in the wild depths of the ocean!

Well, maybe in rock pools but not the wild depths of the ocean.

Octopie should not be able to learn how to open jam jars so easily. Jam jars should completely perplex octopie and leave them scratching their little octopie heads.

But even if a problem does happen to stump one octopus, all it needs is for one of its little (or not so) mates to know how to overcome the problem. Then it just has to watch and it'll learn just by watching its mate.

Yes. Octopie can learn by watching!

This leads to the question, just what are they learning about us right now?

It can't be too hard for them to watch us. We're not exactly very secretive when

we're at the beach or diving in the middle of the ocean. We're probably making it very easy for the octopie to observe us and learn our strengths and weaknesses. But not only that, but also how our technology works.

The only thing that's preventing an octopie invasion of the land is the fact that they clearly can't breath out of water.

Yet.

But it's only a matter of time before they figure out a way around this.

And then we're screwed.

So, yeah. Hollywood was right with their "Octopie are scary! Fear them!" assertions. Even if Hollywood's reasoning behind this is completely wrong, they're still correct.