« Can You Spot the Home of Author Boy? | Main | Stuck, Stuck, Stuckety-Stuck »
December 02, 2005
Cruel Embrace
The fabulous Alethea sent me a link to this video. It shows, of all things, an octopus attacking and killing a shark. Admittedly, the octopus is quite large, and the shark quite small (3-4 feet, we're told), but all the same it's a strange thing to see. I've reached an age where I tend to shy away from the sorts of nature documentary that feature Predator A killing and munching Prey Creature B. When I was a kid I watched such things with a certain glee; these days not so much. It gives me chills.
This video inspires the same chills, but it's enthralling partly because you would never expect an octopus (no matter how many cheesy deep-sea diving movies you saw as a kid) to attack and kill a shark. It's shocking. Enthralling, too. The killing seems so intimate, with the octopus wrapping itself around the immobilised shark and just squeezing for all its worth. It disturbed me more than most film/TV murders--with the possible recent exception of the bit from Saving Private Ryan, where the German soldier has one of the American guys pinned in an upstairs room, and slowly, despite the American's resistance, forces his bayonet into the guy. The slowness of it is excruciating, and the actor playing the American does a great job conveying the horror of it. This is much how I felt watching this octopus murdering that shark.
Posted by adrian at December 2, 2005 05:54 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.kabedford.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/23
Comments
Aargh. I know the exact part you mean in Saving Private Ryan - it made my skin want to crawl over my head and run shrieking from the cinema. On the other hand, how hard is that octopus? A blow for squishy aquatic wiggly things. Tune in again next week, when a small cuttlefish named Brian will eat an adult Great White.
Posted by: pastamasta at December 7, 2005 12:05 AM
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)