

The Octopus That Almost Ate Seattle - danso
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/20/magazine/the-octopus-that-almost-ate-seattle.html?ref=magazine&_r=0&pagewanted=all

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stevvooe
That octopus has been at Cove 2 on Alki for years. I got my SCUBA
certification there nearly 8 years ago and every greybeard diver raved about
this particular octupus. One of the stops on the certification dive was this
old, broken sewer line that exposed a cornucopia of marine life, including
this huge octopus.

May he/she rest in peace.

Edit: Probably not the same octopus [1] but it made me nostalgic.

[1]:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enteroctopus_dofleini#Lifespan_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enteroctopus_dofleini#Lifespan_and_reproduction)

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jcomis
This is so Seattle. Kid does something legal, but frowned upon. Angry mob
forms on internet, spreads his personal information around and makes threats.
Mob reforms after they realize how shitty they are being and creates petition
to make sure no one can do this again, ever. Meanwhile, they all go to the
fancy restaurant that serves the exact same item they are so against some kid
harvesting and rave about it. Seattle.

~~~
ryanisinallofus
How a comment which starts with "This is so Seattle" can recieve a single up
vote is beyond me.

You also fail to point out the real unique aspect of Seattle culture in your
loop.

"Mayer stepped down, and others took the lectern to recite their prepared
remarks, which failed to acknowledge that the threat had effectively just been
neutralized. Eventually, Mike Racine stood to speak, representing the
Washington Scuba Alliance, whose director of conservation, Scott Lundy, first
posted Mayer’s photo online. “I did want to recognize that Dylan Mayer is here
today. He and his family took a lot of heat over the last week for this legal
taking of an octopus. Much of that heat is vitriolic in nature and
inappropriate, and Dylan, just so you know, the Scuba Alliance regrets that,
and we applaud you for being here,” Racine said. The room stood and clapped.
Mayer, once a nemesis of the giant Pacific octopus, had suddenly become its
most visible supporter."

I don't know a single city filled with people which, when presented with new
information responds so positively. Seattle reacts quickly, information
spreads quickly here, but people are also very open minded. More-so than
anywhere else I've lived.

~~~
dubfan
Perhaps, but we still have our share of dense morons (the "wage theft" people,
the May Day crowd, the NIMBY anti-growth types)

~~~
ryanisinallofus
NIMBY anti-growth types are bad, but the "war on cars group" is my least
favorite.

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btbuildem
You know what.. the kid went into the ocean, and wrestled a friggin' octopus
out of it. By hand. As far as hunting goes, that's pretty much the most fair
way to do it.

Save your lamenting for the industrial-scale mechanized harvest of creatures.
His grilled octopus (or whatever he did with it) was orders of magnitude more
ethical than that burger you're about to eat.

~~~
crusso
It's got a macho factor, sure... but ethical?

No more of an ethical issue than using an IDE vs typing in the raw binary with
your "0" and "1" keys.

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tehwalrus
There are a few animals I'd really like to have as pets, because of their
intelligence. Obviously a dog, but also there are a couple of breeds of cat
(aby, burmese, bengal,) plus grey parrots and an octopus. If I could get away
with them, I'd also be up for dolphins. I wouldn't have space for a whale.

I occasionally daydream about hacking up an electronic waterproof octopus toy,
kind of like an underwater "bop it" that I can customise as they learn new
features on it.

It makes me sad to read about any of these animals being hunted. They're too
cool, leave them alone.

~~~
samatman
While intelligent, octopus are dramatically different from other intelligent
species.

They are, somehow, born with their intelligence. Everything else learns it,
all the species you mentioned learn from their parents or surrogates.

Octopus are also a K selected species, laying 200,000 eggs on average.
Furthermore, they are short lived in comparison to any other intelligent
species.

We associate intelligence with individuality and hence with rarity: each human
intelligence is rare because it was cultivated, not born. Octopus aren't like
that.

~~~
tehwalrus
I'm still not sure that it's ethical to kill human clones, just because they
were born fully formed and with pre-programmed intelligence, and die anyway
after a few years.

~~~
ripter
It's ok if they are tasty

~~~
tehwalrus
I don't know whether you're being sarcastic or not[1].

If not, _frown_.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law)

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rwbt
Misleading title! For a moment, I thought a giant marine octopus is attacking
Seattle.

Joking aside, I'm very surprised that the teenager was able to escape a nine
foot giant octopus. I'm sure he'll have a great story to tell for the rest of
his life.

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sharkweek
My random conspiracy is that octopuses are actually alien life form that
crashed into our oceans thousands of years ago.

But seriously; if you're ever up in Seattle, despite the touristy nature, the
aquarium is totally worth a peek. Watching the G.P.O
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypaxG8AnTdE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypaxG8AnTdE))
in it's tank is marvelous; quite majestic creatures, despite absolutely being
one of the things I would least like to encounter in the wild. Countless
reports of them ripping off essential diving equipment.

In the video above, if you' watch the whole thing, the aquarium employee says
"this one is about half full grown."

Interesting article though, it's always fascinating from a social sciences
perspective how the perception of a concept can so quickly shift public
policy.

~~~
MartinCron
The Aquarium docents _love_ to talk about their octopuses. If you get an older
one, they'll tell you about the time when they filled the tank near the top
and the octopus climbed out and flopped upon an unsuspecting visitor!

The water line is kept lower these days.

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triplesec
This is a bait-and-switch title. But while we're here and talking of eating
octopodes [side note: octopii is way off the mark, mixing classical languages;
octopuses is probably in the end the least obnoxious plural], we might bear in
mind our obsession for killing rather than wondering at nature with this
cautionary tale: [http://io9.com/vacationing-family-finds-exceedingly-rare-
hex...](http://io9.com/vacationing-family-finds-exceedingly-rare-hexapus-
kill-939989806)

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andrewflnr
I'm concerned a lot less about people eating octopus than about the only
_legal_ way to take them being a slow death by blunt trauma. I'm very much a
canrnivore, but for pity's sake, make it quick. If the point was to only allow
taking them through bycatch, why not just say that?

~~~
scott_karana
Yeah, that's pretty strange. You can't kill an octopus with a swift knife
blow, or a speargun? Every hunter I've met prefers a quick kill, for both
ethical and culinary reasons (adrenaline-soaked meat).

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mikeash
I'm always fascinated by the psychology of eating animals, and how society
decides which ones are acceptable to eat and which ones aren't. Not that I'm
any exception to it, of course, but I at least try to look at it from the
outside a bit.

We have a diver who killed an animal for food, and this generated tremendous
outrage. Why?

It's certainly not the bare fact that he killed an animal for food. That
happens all the time, and people mostly don't care.

He ended up doing it in front of a crowd, but that's not the reason either. If
he had killed, say, a trout in front of a crowd, nobody would really care.

Nor is it the kind of animal that he killed, not alone. If he had done it in
private then told the public about what happened, there would have been no
outcry.

Clearly it's some combination of the kind of animal _and_ doing it in public.
There's no particular reason either one should matter, though. There is, it
appears, nothing particularly special about this animal that makes it a bad
choice for food compared to other animals. But clearly it does matter.

I think it comes down to the simple fact that this was an unusual event. And
though there was nothing specific about this event that should lead to outcry,
the mere fact that it was unusual is enough. A lot of city dwellers are
fundamentally uncomfortable with eating meat. Most of them still do it, but
they hide behind the various structures that exist between the living animal
and their dinner plate to kind of ignore it. I've heard of people seriously
saying things like, "It's wrong to kill an animal for meat. You should just
buy it from the grocery store." I'm sure most people are not that ignorant,
but there's a similar sort of avoiding thinking about the stark reality of
slaughtering and butchering.

So you have a bunch of people suddenly confronted with that which they try to
ignore. Some of them are outraged by the mechanics of killing and eating an
animal. But most of them still eat cows and pigs and chickens which are
routinely killed in ways not really different from this. What reason could
there be for their outrage, then? It can't be that they're outraged at the
overall concept of killing an animal for food. But, ah hah! This is an unusual
animal, so it must be that!

And that, I think, is how you end up with a conservation campaign for an
animal that is not endangered and not, ultimately, all that special.

I could be way off, but it's interesting to think about.

~~~
DanBC
> There is, it appears, nothing particularly special about this animal that
> makes it a bad choice for food compared to other animals.

Octopuses are intelligent. They are playful and awesome. You've seen the video
of octopuses using coconut shells to hide in?

~~~
girvo
Humans have this interesting habit of anthropomorphising animals, especially
if they do something that seems "human".

~~~
mikeash
Just look at how many people think dolphins (or even dogs!) are happy because
they're "smiling".

~~~
the_watcher
Do we know that dogs are not smiling? Anecdotally, my dogs seem to smile when
they are happy (when I pet them, give them treats, play with them, etc.) I'm
genuinely curious about this.

~~~
mikeash
Some may, perhaps learned from humans, but _in general_ a dog will signal
happiness by e.g. wagging the tail, and "smiling" as in baring teeth signals
something like aggression or fear.

Which, of course, is why you should never smile at an angry dog.

~~~
the_watcher
I see the smiling along with wagging their tail, and I know the difference
between what I see as a dog smile (mouth open, ears back, tail wagging, eyes
squinting) and baring their teeth.

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amac
I noticed my site ([http://octopus.org](http://octopus.org)) spiked in traffic
today - can't be co-incidental. Octopus are fascinating and the more we learn
about them, the more they fascinating they become.

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ryanisinallofus
I'm a vegetarian who is supportive of hunting. If you are going to eat meat,
hunting and butchering it yourself is by far the most ethical and
environmentally sound method of obtaining flesh as food. I simply can't reason
with someone who finds it OK to eat an animal, but sleeps with one on the foot
of her bed, and rages when someone else hunts.

That said eating octopus and specifically the GPO is particularly unethical if
you subscribe to intelligence being related to sentience. Additionally it
appears that octpus legs contain brain cells, the part you eat is in part
brain.

~~~
glitch003
Yes but as someone said above, pigs are also particularly intelligent animals,
and we eat the hell out of them.

So how can you reconcile those two things?

~~~
scott_karana
Why would ryanisinallofus need to reconcile those things? He is a vegetarian.

I'd say that we meat-eaters are the ones who have to reconcile them.

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jeffblake
I'm a SCUBA instructor (trained and living in Vancouver BC), from Seattle..
and I can definitely attest to the character of pacific northwest divers as
being very pro-environment, "protect the wildlife", to the point of craziness.
Oh man, I can only imagine the aggressive and passive-aggressive reactions
this kid got when he pulled that thing out of the water...

Sure, they're nice creatures. If I had a choice, more often than not I would
say let the thing be. But I also own a speargun and hunt on occasion. I like
the sport, and it feels good to put your own skills on the table once in a
awhile. What irritates me is how irrationally angry people get... it's an act
of selfishness, a chance for a relatively passive person to stand up for
something. It's not really about the octopus, it's about their beliefs. People
have to stand for something... whether that's Obama or an Octopus, it doesn't
really matter.

The cool thing about running a company, as I'm sure a lot of people here do,
is how quickly you get to see the big picture on the world, and sit in the
shoes of everyone else's perspective. Wearing a lot of hats and working on
hard things really trains you to only give a shit about things that matter,
things you can have an influence on, where the goal is not to change people's
opinion subjectively, but to prove, objectively, that you can add value and
earn a place on this planet.

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the_watcher
>> was just liking to look at it reason enough.

This made me think about pandas. I'm not an expert in this at all, so please
correct me if I am wrong about any of this, but it seems like the panda bear's
evolutionary adaptation is that humans think they are cute. They rarely
reproduce, sometimes roll over and kill their own young, and eat bamboo, which
I believe they struggle to digest. But, humans love them, so they get lots of
protection.

~~~
jlgreco
That seems more like luck of the draw than an adaptation. They're not
domesticated (like livestock or cats/dogs) and probably have not been relying
on humans for very long.

Furthermore, IIRC they are more reluctant to breed in captivity than in the
wild, so being cute isn't exactly helping their population numbers like it
would other animals.

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msg
This article has an interesting meta about the conflict between the gourmet
and environmental protection approaches to exotic wildlife, that itself is
half food article and half human interest story about octopus punching.

Worth the read.

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jaimebuelta
I find this interesting. Where I'm from (Spain), octopi are routinely eaten
and are considered delicious. I guess it depends on the person, but I'd say
piscitarians will eat them.

What he did will be considered the same as someone fishing for, let's say,
trout.

I guess it depends a lot on the local culture.

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coldcode
No one asked the octopus what it thought. Maybe someday we can communicate - I
wonder if we would eat it then.

~~~
scotch_drinker
"If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We
might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason." Jack Handy

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Theodores
Coming soon: Braised Stephen Hawking on lightly buttered toast!

Speaking as a vegetarian(!) I found the content of this article to be quite
disturbing. Octopii are very special creatures and it is lamentable that this
article is essentially what they taste like, how to butcher them and where to
go to eat them.

~~~
judk
It is a bad idea to eat a creature with nerve disease.

~~~
Pxtl
iirc, Hawking no longer has the disease. That is, his disease only was
actually "active" for about 5 years... it's just that the damage was
irreversible. This is why he survived ALS when most people die of it.

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judk
I was hoping this would be about the Northwest Tree Octopus.

