Artigenda
World Octopus Day
When: anually, October 8.
It’s the one day dedicated to the marine animal with eight arms or tentacles and three hearts. This day is World Octopus Day and it’s here not to focus on food, but awareness. Raising awareness of how we can protect the octopus. There’s a good reason that this day’s the day for World Octopus Day. This is not just because of the eighth day of October. Also because of the tenth month of the year, which is OCTOber.
Every octopus is a squid, not every squid is an octopus
How was it: an octopus is a squid, only not every squid is an octopus. That has to do with how well you can count. Some squids have eight tentacles, which makes them octopuses. Others have even more. For instance, there are squids with as many as ten arms.
When we are having so much fun with facts. A squid is the species name and it is not a fish at all. Even subspecies such as the cuttlefish or the squid are not fish. Another difference between squids and octopuses: an octopus is always poisonous.
Giant Pacific octopus
The giant Pacific octopus or the Enteroctopus dofleini, known also as the North Pacific giant octopus is probably the largest octopoda of all species. The name octopoda is a more common name for the octopus, as this is the official designation for these marine animals. The more common name is octopus only. The official name for the class to which they belong (the squids) is cephalopoda.
Bron: Wikimedia Commons.
The giant croaker’s habitat consists of the Pacific Ocean and especially near Japan, the Aleutians, Alaska and California. So the chances of encountering a giant croaker in the North Sea are exceptional. If you do, the animal will certainly stand out. The arm length of a large specimen can be up to more than four metres long. An adult animal’s weight can range between 15 and 70 kilos. The colour of the animal is reddish-brown.
The kraken
Source: Wikimedia Commons.
The giant kraken is an octopus that has been proven to exist. The same cannot be said for the kraken (sometimes mentioned with the capital K (Kraken)). The kraken is a sea monster, a mythical creature. Actually, it is nothing more than a fable animal that has an origin in Scandinavia. So its origins cannot be traced back to Pirates of The Caribbean. The first mention of this creature dates back to Norse mythology and it was a bizarrely large sea creature. The next mention then dates back to 1250. Only two such creatures are said to exist.
In 1555, Olof Månsson (1490 – 1577) wrote a book on the history of Skandinavia. He made mention of a sea creature of enormous size allegedly found by the bishop of Nidaros. In fact, this animal was said to have been so big that the bishop first thought it was a rock. He thought that was a good place for a mass. Hence, he placed an altar on it; as soon as he was done with this, the animal slid into the sea and disappeared.
After this, the kraken appeared regularly in literary works. Think, for example, of Alfred Tennyson (1809 – 1892), in the 1830 sonnet The Kraken, and Jules Verne (1828 – 1905) in the book Twenty Thousand Miles Under the Sea (1870).
Reputation
Het nadeel aan al deze vermeldingen was dat de inktvis en de octopus daarmee ook een wat vervelende reputatie kregen. Dit was eigenlijk nergens voor nodig. Tel daarbij op dat men op grote schaal op dieren begon te jagen, vanwege consumptie en daar was een status aparte voor de zeedieren.
Day of awareness
An internet search for recipes for octopus is very easy. These are not shared, by the way. On a day like today, it is not about that at all! Indeed, it is not about that at all. It’s about protecting these animals. That does not include consumption. It is a good time to think about whether hunting these animals is a good idea. It is also a good time to think about the impact of climate change and environmental pollution on the habitat of these marine animals.
