Anglers encounter ‘weird-looking’ octopus that is indeed bizarre

Folks aboard a Florida fishing charter on Friday enjoyed a rare encounter with a blanket octopus that swam alongside their boat for several minutes.

Folks aboard a Florida fishing charter on Friday enjoyed a rare encounter with a blanket octopus that swam alongside their boat for several minutes.

“[She] was very curious of the boat and the squid on our fishing lines,” Capt. Tony Zain, owner of Skyway Sportfishing,” told For The Win Outdoors. “It was an awesome sight.”

The accompanying footage – an audio version can be viewed here – shows the female octopus spreading her webbed arms as she swims cautiously toward the vessel, prompting a dumbfounded crewman to declare, “That is the weirdest-looking thing.”

Blanket octopuses, which reside in tropical and subtropical pelagic waters, are identifiable by sheet-like webbing that, when outstretched, can make them appear larger to potential predators.

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Video footage almost always involves females, which can measure about six feet and weigh 10,000 times more than their one-inch male counterparts, who seem to exist purely for mating.

Male blanket octopuses mate by detaching a modified sperm-filled arm, which females store in their mantle cavity for fertilization. The males almost always die after this process.



Another interesting characteristic: Blanket octopuses are immune to the stings of sea jellies, or jellyfish, and will sometimes tear off and wield the tentacles of Portuguese man-o-war jellies to ward off predators.

Passengers on the Skyway Sportfishing charter, who were fishing for snapper and grouper off Sarasota in the Gulf of Mexico, might not have known any of this while gazing down at the octopus – and who can blame them?

Stated researcher Rebecca R. Helm in a tweet: “That’s the amazing thing about open ocean life, you never know where it’s going to pop up.”