Marine biologist Helen Scales had seen octopuses before – but she had never had a meeting quite like this one
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If I could relive any wildlife encounter, it would be the time last summer when I played peekaboo with an octopus. Usually, when I find myself in the rare company of an underwater celebrity, such as a beautiful, eight-armed cephalopod, only a few fleeting moments pass before I unintentionally scare it away. But this octopus wasn’t going anywhere.
I was floating in knee-high water, heading back to shore after a long free-dive off the coast of Brittany, when I saw the octopus right in front of me. It was a common octopus (Octopus vulgaris), a species that has recently been showing up in large numbers along north-east Atlantic coasts. Octopus booms have happened before, most likely linked to warm currents bringing streams of paralarvae, the mini-octopuses that drift for a time before settling on to the seabed. In 1899, fishers in Cornwall and Devon moaned about a plague of octopuses climbing into their crab pots and munching all the bait. In the last few years, octopuses off Brittany have been doing the same thing.
Helen Scales is a marine biologist and writer
Welcome to the Guardian’s invertebrate of the year competition! Every day between April 2-12 we’ll be profiling one of the incredible invertebrates that live in and around the UK. Let us know which invertebrates you think we should be including here. And at midnight on Friday 12 April, voting will open to decide which is our favourite invertebrate. The winner will be announced on Monday 15 April.
