Nature
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Most people would probably be a bit freaked out if an octopus appeared and started wrapping its sucker-laden limbs around them, but that’s far from the case for one marine videographer, who recently captured footage in which a large, red octopus appears to have given them a quick cuddle.
The videographer in question is Jules Casey, who says she’s formed a friendship with this particular marine critter, a Maori octopus dubbed “Priscilla”. “I’m currently making a short film about our incredible friendship and her life, which includes several other Maori Octopuses in the area,” Casey told Storyful.
In a video taken by Casey in the waters near a pier in Rye, Victoria, Priscilla can be seen approaching the camera before briefly embracing it and then retreating.
This is far from a unique encounter between the two, according to Casey. “I have been checking on her for quite a few months, almost daily. She feels comfortable having me swim along side of her while she hunts for crabs. She will often reach out and explore my camera and give me cuddles.”
Casey isn’t the only one to have forged a partnership with an octopus. One such relationship was featured in the 2020 Netflix documentary My Octopus Teacher, in which filmmaker Craig Foster spends a year getting up close and personal with a common octopus in the Great African Seaforest. This too sees physical contact between human and octopus, with the film’s cephalopod star at one point “rushing” over to Foster and wrapping its limbs around his chest.
Whether or not these octopuses are dishing out “hugs” in the same way as we understand them to be is unclear; that this could be a case of anthropomorphism (attributing human traits to something non-human) is not out of the question. Humans do it all the time.
But neither is it entirely out of the realm of possibility, even if it might seem unlikely. We know that octopuses are highly intelligent, and some scientists believe they are also sentient, with recent research suggesting that they are capable of feeling pain.
“They sense fear, they respond to their environment, literally through the changing of the colour of their skin. They shapeshift, they are very playful. They are incredibly inquisitive, that is the definition of sentience,” Sophika Kostyniuk, Managing Director at the Aquatic Life Institute, told IFLScience in an episode of The Big Questions.
All that isn’t to say you should find the nearest bit of ocean and actively try to get a hug from an octopus; touching marine life (or any wild animal, for that matter) is the ultimate no-no unless absolutely necessary. Plough ahead anyway and you might just get slapped – or worse.
