My encounter with a blue ring octopus, more deadly than a funnelweb spider! Boy that sounds dramatic doesn’t it; I guess it’s true really, if a Blue Ring gets a bite on you your stuffed!
The central nervous system shuts down, your vital organs, heart, lungs, etc don’t function and you lay there (assuming you make it out of the water) listening to everyone say you are stuffed because the really annoying thing is your brain works and so you get to hear all about it. Well not for long anyway because you will pass on fairly soon without your heart and lungs co-operating. Unless of course your gallant friends maintain effective CPR for about 12-24 hours in which case you will get to hear about how stuffed you are until they either give up or you pull though.
So what the hell am I doing, crawling around under Edithburgh Pier in
So here I am among the pylons on the pier searching. We have been here a couple of days and made several dives, this dive will be my last before I have to fly back to Sydney, exchange my warm comfy dry suit for my 3mm wetsuit and fly on to the warm comfy waters of Cairns to run my next U/W photo course for James Cook University. Despite the dry suit I am aware of the 14 degree water, especially after 60 minutes down here and I am staying warm thinking about
My friends, John Smith & Melanie, both very accomplished blue ring ocy photographers had kindly shared their best octopus secret! Look inside the razor shells they said, penthouse accommodation from a blue rings perspective! Well I had looked inside hundreds of bloody razor shells, no octopus, perhaps someone had put up the rent on penthouses. My fingers were going numb from the cold, now I know why they call them blue ring!
Finally one last razor shell, probing with my light beam I detect something inside, focusing through my highly magnified 60mm macro lens I notice tentacles, realising she has been detected the action begins. Tentacle by tentacle she extends herself like the creature from the movie Alien unravelling from its camouflaged background. At first she displays annoyance and just a few blue rings appear. Then she gets angry at my persistence and flashes up in a neon display of blue rings all over her body. She starts to move out and as she does she reveals a cluster of baby blue ring eggs previously hidden under her mantle. If she could bite me she would but covered head to toe in neoprene I am in no danger. She leaves the razor shell and jet propels herself into the seagrass. I have a terrific sequence of the world’s most deadly octopus, I don’t want to stress her any further, I want her to stay nearby so she can return to her razor shell. Most of all I really don’t want to really piss her off, I start thinking about my lips and the little bit of exposed skin between my mask and hood.
If that pissed off blue ring jumps on my face you are going to see a daring, deep sea diver, underwater cameraman and legendary marine animal wrangler dissolve in a fit of terror just like I did when that dammed alien embryo jumped on the face of the actor in Alien!
Note: Kevin’s encounter with the blue ring octopus will be part of a future
