OCTOPUS FOR A ZOO.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19215, 2 January 1926, Page 2 (Supplement)

OCTOPUS FOR A ZOO.

LONDON'S ACQUISITION. AN EVILLY-DISPOSED MONSTER. Those unwearying scientists at the London Zoo have gained another triumph. After failure upon failure they have got an octopus, alive and evilly-disposed, into the sea-water tank 3 of their aquarium. Two difficulties have to be encountered in attaining this end, says a London paper. Octopi teem in southern waters where they are not wanted, but cannot easily be caught, and they require such immense quantities of oxygen in the water they breathe that when they are captured and despatched to the Zoo they generally die on the way to town. • But at the timo of writing one is well and active at our great home of natural wonders in Regent's Park, and all who will may see it, marvel, and shudder at its skill and strength. Each of its eight arms is furnished with sucker discs and horny grapnels; and once these grip, unless the octopus voluntarily releases its hold, the limb must bo torn off to secure freedom. It is one of the curiosities of scientific writing that the men who know all about this creature's

astonishing anatomy still express doubts as to whether the octopus actually attacks human beings. For fifty years there stood in the late Lord Grenfell's diary the record of a terrible fight he had with an octopus in the sea off Malta. His flesh was torn and full of the broken grapnels of the brute, which had all but mastered him when he was rescued in the nick of time.

Three years ago a lady of Tunhridge Wells, when bathing at a French resort, was seized in a horrifying grip by an octopus which, when killed, was found to measure 64in. from tip to tip of its longest tentacles.

Soon afterward Jersey fishermen had an experience equalling in horror any ancient sea legend. As one of the men was hauling in a net two huge tentacles appeared above the water. One grasped the mast of the boat, the other gripped the fisherman by the legs. The man was just on the point of being dragged into the sea when a comrade lashed at tho arms of the octopus with a heavy knife and cut them off.

This happened near Jailer's Reef, near the Roche Douvres,«. the scene of Victor Hugo's classic description of a Homeric combat between a man and a niighl;y octopus. The illustrious Frenchman "had a poet's imagination, and he was inclined to exagg2rate, but in essentials lie was accurate. «