At the Seattle Aquarium, the annual tradition of watching live octopuses bone down Valentine’s Day was cancelled last night. Why? Cannibalism concerns, of course.
The aquarium staff was worried that the huge male scheduled for sex was so huge that he would simply devour the females. Which is funny since typically it’s the larger female octopus that strangles and eats the male after copulation. Seattle ABC affiliate KOMO reports that the yearly display of “8-armed nooky” was called off because the Seattle Aquarium’s 36kg male octopus named Kong was too big a partner for the 13-18kg females. Kong could’ve easily eaten a female half his size, and nobody wanted to watch that sort of octopus-on-octopus carnage.
The Seattle Aquarium is the same place where an octopus made an attempted break for it by scaling the side of its uncovered holding cell last year. Pacific Northwest cephalopods are apparently total loose cannons.
[KOMO via The Daily Dot]
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