‘The finger-touch sent shivers down my spine’: my encounter with a common octopus

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

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