Octopuses
Since coming to Raroia, we have found five octopuses!
On Sunday morning, we were doing some beachcombing, finally making it back to the dinghy with our handful of good shells, and having a hard time leaving behind all of the other shells that were just lying there on the beach calling to us. I was wading through the water with Mom; she wanted to wade because she said it wad good for her thighs, even though she had just screamed at two passing eels. She had just said that she was disappointed that we have not found any big shells when I looked down and saw what I thought was a big shell wedged in a rock. It was sort of orange and round, and upon closer inspection, it almost did not look like a shell. It was too blob-like, and when I reached down to pry it out of the hole it was in, it moved! Did I imagine it? Shells do not just wiggle out of your way every day, you know! …
Ah-ha! Now I know what it is!
An octopus! It was a little baby octopus that is very skilled at changing colors and camouflaging himself. The moment Dad saw him he said, “Dinner”, but luckily, he was just joking! The last octopus we touched in Daniel’s Bay in Nuku Hiva stuck out one tentacle and let us pet him, but this little guy was not going to give himself up that easily, no. We sat there with our hands in the water while he decided if we were worthy enough to touch him. Then we had to stay very still while he examined us with his weird- feeling suckers, or else he would disappear back into his hole and we would not get a good picture.
After a little while, we discovered three things about our new friend, 1: He likes Dad’s hand the best (probably because he does not flinch), 2: He likes my blue shoes but not Molly’s, and 3: He is very friendly once he gets to know you. Well, he got to know us all right, because we were not going to let him go until we picked him up. Note: Don’t try that at home, especially if the octopus is very tiny with either purple or blue spots.
To pick him up, we herded him into shallow water (Mom was taking lots of pictures, of course) and kept him there while Dad got a soda bottle that was lying on the beach and cut the top off. We scooped him up in the bottle and right away he started coming back out, first the tentacles, stick, slurp, squelch, and then the rest of him followed and he plopped right onto Dad’s hands! Now it was a free-for-all! Molly and I stuck our hands in right away. “Wow, this feels really weird!” “Look he’s crawling on my hands!” “He’s really sticky!” He was out of the water, but did we care? No! Mr. Octo did not care either, and we got to hold him! I guess it was sort of a win/I don’t care situation; we got to hold an octopus, and watch him turn colors, and he did not bite us or anything. After he fell off our hands, he just sat there staring at us. I don’t think he was very mad or scared; we did not want to injure or frighten the poor thing!
There were three octopuses that we definitely did not frighten. In fact, they frightened us just a little bit! When we were snorkeling on Monday, we saw two giant octopuses in their coral dens. I was sitting in the dinghy on camera duty due to an ear infection that did not allow me to go swimming. It was my job to watch what Dad and Molly were shooting with the camera and press “record” when they found something really good. That day we shot a lot of film, especially of the two big octopuses. The octopuses were squeezed into holes in the coral, but Dad could tell by the size of the tentacles that they were about six feet long! He also said that when he poked the octopus gently with the camera pole, the octopus reached out, grabbed the pole and would not let go! We set the camera down outside of one’s hole and now we have some really good film of him inspecting the camera. We also got a lot of film of the bright colored fishes that were found around all the coral heads in the South Pacific.
The last two octopuses we found were small - smaller than the first one. Molly found them in the shallow water next to the beach where we built our palm frond house. We tried to corner them and get them into shallow water where we could pick them up, but they were too slippery. Also, none of us had any shoes on and the sand we were trying to walk on was not actually sand, it was broken shells, rocks, and coral. Ouch! They were slippery, but we did get lots of pictures of them changing colors! We will try to put those on the web as soon as we reach Tahiti! Happy reading! Jessie