I first saw the video in my facebook feed late last summer, posted by a flurry of nerds and naturalist types…
It was hosted by The Guardian* online with the lurid headline,
“Octopus leaps onto rocks to drag crab to it’s death in Western Australia”.
Baited, I clicked…
What followed was the jerky hand held footage of a [kind of] crab on the distinctive sedimentary rock of Cape Naturalist… as familiar as childhood to anyone from WA.
Golden light of the late afternoon; the sea breeze peaks into the microphone, distorting the sound. It’s innocuous enough, the person holding the device moves closer to her subject to get a better shot the crab now dipping it’s feet into the edge of the rock pool. Feet? Claws?
It’s mesmerising in it’s banality… shot on an iphone probably.
At the twenty second mark, it’s like the water itself launches at the crustacean, and a previously unseen shadow is upon the crab, pushing it into a nearby pool.
Something squeaks, as the camera flails attempting to reframe the action.
In review you can discern dark tentacles, the shiny wet skin, the deep purple of the colouring, and eventually our young director of photography, takes in breath sharply, and calls out…
‘Sadé! There is an octopus eating a crab!’
The accent is broadly Australian, and the excitement is contagious…
The octopus, having secured it’s prey, now begins to drag it back to it’s pool.
The camera zooms in, and the genre switches from ‘beach follies’, to ‘B grade science fiction movie’. On second thought, make that ‘dark psychological horror’…
Tentacles whip and flay, as the monster from the deep [ocean or space, who can tell anymore…] drags the thing over rock with a calculated and methodical focus that is truly unsettling.
It’s head dilates and contracts as if gulping for air, feeling it’s way back it’s comfort zone.
When it reaches the water, it almost pauses and composes itself, before effortlessly floating back under the rock from whence it came.
Silently. Gracefully. Like a space craft docking the mothership, taking the unfortunate crab with it…
And then all was still, like it was never there.
After processing what has just happened, our juvenile witness exclaims emphatically… ‘HOLY! SHIT!’
It was exactly what I was thinking...
And portentous considering what was to come…
This was just a little one… working alone.
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* An octopus is filmed dragging a crab to its death in Western Australia. The octopus emerges from a rock pool in Yallingup, south of Perth, and pulls the unfortunate crustacean into the pool. While it's rare for octopuses to be filmed on land, it is not unusual for intertidal octopuses to roam between rockpools in the search for food – and this could be the first time one has been filmed hunting on land. As they breathe through gills, they cannot stay out of water for long