Here’s a couple fun octopus escape videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvvjcQIJnLg
Octopus attacking a crab.
(Thanks, Jade!)
Little bit of artistic license on this one: out of water Felix would probably not be holding his head upright due to lack of buoyancy and bones.
Wow. Felix was all “Clams? Pfft, I don’t do puzzles when clams are at stake, man!”
This
Felix says screw the rules, I want clams.
Get off of the grate Anthony! You are standing between a hungry carnivore and his food.
And he’s bigger than you.
That IS possible. “Giant Pacific octopuses live up to their names. While they average 90 pounds, they’re known to weigh up to 150, with the largest authenticated weight coming in at 156 pounds. And their arm spans can be up to an incredible 20 feet across—about the height of a two-story building.”
And it’s all muscle.
I see someone reads Freefall.
Of course, don’t we all?
I didn’t, but I do now. Thank you.
Welcome to the club! I look forward to hearing who your favorite character is.
Naomi and Tangent. Flo gets some of her best lines, talking with them. Naomi makes her smile. And with a smile like that Flo has been told that she can be VERY persuasive!
Dude… Watch “octopus leaps out of water” and watch that sucker attack a crab on land! Amazing, and scary-badass. It got so excited on land, its legs all flailing around. I can’t believe they got it on video…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ar5WJrQik2o
WOW, that thing just POUNCED on it. I also liked how it grabbed the crab from behind to avoid the claws, good idea there.
Yup! Most exciting octo vid I have set to date.
But couldn’t Felix technically fit through any of the holes so long as they were larger than his beak?
I believe so, yes.
Clearly, you should not get between an octopi and their clams. :O
Felix has probably been presented with this puzzle every day since the aquarium started doing this presentaton. He’s had time to study it.
Reminds me of when I went to Tivoli with a friend last year (Tivoli being an amusement park in Copenhagen, Denmark). They have one of the biggest aquariums there, including an octopi show, where they give an octopus a jar with a crab inside it.
The best part of that show, imo, was that the guide had gotten things ready, by lifting the lid off the octopus tank, and while he was standing with the jar with the crab, he was telling the audience some facts about octopi, and while doing that, the octopus behind him reached a tentacle out of the tank, as if to go “Hey! HEY! Give me the crab, dangit!”
I need to look through my files and see if I got the video of that somewhere XD it was pretty funny.
The Mission:Impossible theme is playing in my head right now.
… Now I want to see a spy movie where the main character is an octopus.
Octodad: The Movie!
I would go for Octodad the Movie, but they’d probably just turn it into the modern grossout-comedy (because kids like gross stuff, right? add some farts and goo and stuff!) with really stupid lowest-common-denominator absolutely-no-wit-or-creativity humor, the way they managed to ruin several movies that I refused to watch purely from the commercials. This is why I avoid modern comedy movies unless strongly persuaded by friends and family to give it a shot.
Garfield. The Borrowers (not the British one, those were good; I mean the John Goodman one). Anything by Dr. Seuss. I think they also did Stewart Little and Alvin and the Chipmunks this way.
I don’t recall actually reading Paddington Bear as a kid, but I’m almost positive that it didn’t have an atmosphere that jived with cleaning out his ears with toothbrushes.
So if they did end up making Octodad into a movie, I’m very much afraid they would absolutely ruin it. Probably put in a scene of him wrecking a bathroom, that’s all the rage these days. Which is sad. Because there is so much potential entirely from the premise, they don’t need stupid comedy to compensate.
I am told that the Paddington movie is actually low on the gross-out/wrecking humor (as in, the trailer had most of it), but I still haven’t had the nerve to watch it after cringing through the trailer.
Well, not gonna make me watch it on purpose, but maybe if one of the kids happens to want it I’ll consider it.
You know how prevalent the “wreck a bathroom” scene is getting? They did that with WOLVERINE. Because when I think of an origins-of-Wolverine movie, I totally think of him freaking out as he accidentally wrecks a bathroom. That’s got Logan written all over it, yes-sirree.
I mean, it’s not the worst way that movie squandered its potential, but still.
The worst way was the abomination they claimed was Gambit. Ugh.
I didn’t know I needed that but I totally do.
Professor Cooper is going to fall in!!!!
Wait, are these just the stupidest scientists in the world? What reputable worker at an aquarium wouldn’t know an octopus could squeeze through those bars?
Even odds they’re putting on a show (note how the guy calls out /to Felix/, continuing to fix audience observation on Felix and his shennanigans, despite Octopi hearing being optimized well above human voice ranges. Note also how easily he rolls with it, incorporating Felix’s escape into the act), or just didn’t think about it because that’s a standard enclosure and they don’t have this sort of issue with any other life-form. Certainly, they may not have had an issue with Felix in particular exhibiting this behavior before.
Part of the problem is that building around a particularly clever and unpredictable /category/ of animal is both difficult and expensive on a level a lot of aquariums can’t cope with even if they want to. Especially an animal as improbably flexible as an octopus.
Clever ones roll with it, and try to work with octopodes who are chill enough not to be a problem and keep them that way, but I’m not sure it’s feasible for most aquariums to maintain a complete zero incident record with octopi. They’re too smart, too good at lateral thinking and too alien to consistently predict.
And just to contribute to the videos of octopi being unpredictable and awesome:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjQr3lRACPI
Well, it’s a known fact that octopi are smarter than we give them credit for… and have a tendency to start trying to amuse themselves if they get bored. Such as escaping from their enclosure, going into another one, eating the occupants, then going back.
Or Otto, the resident octopus in an aquarium in Germany. His list of misdeeds includes: cracking the glass of his tank by throwing rocks at it, spraying water at the overhead lights and actually managing to cause a power outage by doing this, and… juggling the hermit crabs.
All that money wasted on a special door and lowering device when they coulda just bought more clams!
Snake? SNAAAAKE!
Is it just me, or does Felix look extremely smug in the last panel?
If Felix was so smart… why didn’t he just jet under the door when they started lowering it, eh?
Either that or he’s well trained and this IS all part of the show.
And with a super twist, Félix rushes straight to the Sarnothi! !!!
Said the mollusc to the vertebrate: “I bet you regret your fancy internal skeletons now! Look at this!”
Hi there. I’m enjoying the comic, thank you for making it. I have to say though that octopuses don’t have tentacles. Most of the other cephalopods do, but what you’re calling tentacles are their arms. Tentacles are the two longer bits you can see best in most squids. The difference is that tentacles only have suckers at the bottom and arms have them the whole length up. It’s a super common mistake, but I figured that it’d be good to point it out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalopod_limb
I was originally going to comment on your use of “octopi”, but I did more research into it and though “octopus” came from Greek (not latin) and would be pluralized as octopuses, octopi (or even octopodes) is an accepted pluralization due to living languages and that stuff.
http://grammarist.com/usage/octopi-octopuses/
Keep doing what you’re doing though! I appreciate your dedication to your craft. Have a good day 😀
RUN, KENIAN, RUN!
An aquarium in Newport, Oregon, not too far from where I live, has a “behind the scenes tour” where one can “shake hands” with an octopus. The family and I did this a few years ago, and I remember the tour guide saying that the octopuses were very adept escape artists, and the aquarium workers had gotten used to finding them in other areas of the exhibit. (I also remember that the octopus I “shook hands” with had quite a grip!)
YOU CAN SHAKE HANDS WITH AN OCTOPUS IN THE NEWPORT AQUARIUM???? Sorry, I’m just…. uhh… making vacation plans.
I like that he didn’t do the “trick” seems to me if I was a super smart animal and there was a yummy treat I would do whatever I though twas faster to get it too.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the octopus is loose. Please stay calm. Please stay ca…Ladies and gentlemen a little girl is eating the octopus. Please stay calm.
Never was able to confirm whether this actually happened or was just a story the aquarium workers told, but the Seattle Aquarium octopus actually did something like this. Only he did it regularly, and stealthily.
So you see, the octopus tank is in a room with quite a few other tanks; lots to see, very fun. But the aquarium workers noticed that each morning there were fewer crabs in the crab tank than the night before. Something was eating them, but they couldn’t figure out what or how (they probably thought it was raccoons or vandals getting into the building or something). Despite their precautions, this continued for several nights, until they finally installed video cameras to record the culprit.
And that’s how they learned that the octopus was clever enough, determined enough, and a skilled enough climber to clamber out of its tank, drag itself across the floor to the crab tank, fish out a crab or two, eat them, and then shimmy back over to its own tank and climb back in before the staff came back for the morning!