Octopus filmed hunting a crab on land

[Reefa]

Don’t get too excited, Futurama fans. This isn’t a video showing the first Decapodian to arrive on Earth. It’s just an ordinary octopus on the prowl for his lunch, only, it’s doing so on land.

The video was shot on the Australian coast, near Yallingup — a holiday town that’s located about 160 miles south of Perth. The woman behind the camera, fittingly enough, is an assistant at Burswood Seafood, an Australian supplier of things like fish, lobster, and crabs.

You may not have known it, but octopii love to eat crab and they’ll pull out every cephalopod trick in the book to snatch one of the delicious crustaceans. They’ll figure out how to open containers to get them out and come slinking out of the shallows and onto the shore to grab an unsuspecting crab (like this one) right off the beach.

The video doesn’t show it, but you may be wondering what happens after an octopus catches a crab like this. First, the victim is injected with saliva that contains a paralytic. Once the crab has been subdued, the octopus will begin dismembering it, breaking its meal into nice little bite-sized chunks. It’s a fate this crab (and many others) would no doubt love to avoid, but that tangle of tentacles and all those sticky suckers make escape a rather tricky proposition.

They also don’t have a whole lot of time to pull it off. An octopus can make short work of a crab once it’s captured. Who can blame them? Ocean-fresh crab is rather delicious.

http://www.geek.com/geek-cetera/octopus-filmed-hunting-a-crab-on-land-1616444/