This Is The Biggest Octopus Ever Caught On Camera
If any animal on earth has superpowers, it has to be the octopus. The cephalopods are fascinating in their abilities to shape-shift and change color, which at least the Giant Pacific kind can do in one-tenth of a second, according to Oceana. They are considered the smartest invertebrates on earth. They can learn, solve problems, and navigate through mazes, per Smithsonian Magazine.
Octopuses have no skeleton or exoskeleton and can squeeze into tiny crevices to escape predators or even captivity. Like that time Inky the Octopus busted out of The National Aquarium of New Zealand by breaking out of his enclosure through a small gap at the top, according to The New York Times, and made his way about eight feet across the floor to a 6-inch drain where he contorted his "soccer ball"-sized body into the 164-foot long drain pipe to make his Nemo-esque escape back to Hawke's Bay. Respect.
Octopuses can move underwater, or apparently anywhere, by using their eight tentacled arms as legs, or they can simply use good old-fashioned jet-propulsion by sucking water into their mantle cavities then pushing it back out, using the water-jet to steer themselves, per the National Wildlife Foundation. Octopuses have three hearts that pump blue, copper-based blood, and their suction cups can be used individually to touch and taste. They can even regrow their arms if need be, according to National Geographic. Bottom line, anyone who says the octopus is their spirit animal must think pretty highly of themselves.
The largest-documented octopus spanned 30 feet
According to National Geographic, there are roughly 300 species of octopus and they can be found in every ocean on earth, where they enjoy feasts of intellectually inferior shellfish like shrimp, mollusks, and crabs. With that many species, there are also huge discrepancies in their sizes. Nat Geo reports octopuses can range from a wee half an inch (aww!) to as big as 30 feet across weighing up to 600 pounds (yikes!).
The largest known species of octopus is the Giant Pacific octopus, which lives, obviously, in the Pacific Ocean. According to Octolab TV, while it's known that octopus can get as big as 30 feet and 600 pounds, that's only because a dead one washed up on the shore of British Columbia, Canada. As far as science is concerned, that's the biggest one ever documented, but that doesn't mean there aren't bigger ones out there that have not been "properly documented."
Still, as far as what has been caught on camera, only the more average-sized Giant Pacific octopuses have been captured. According to Deep Marine Scenes they usually reach about 16 feet across, making them the biggest octopus ever to be filmed.