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Spending time in the open water can be extremely relaxing. You can enjoy the calm of the vast sea, admire its natural beauty, and then bam! A seal smacks you in the face with an octopus. Ok, the last one might not be extremely common, but it is what happened to an unfortunate kayaker in New Zealand.
Kyle Mulinder and his friends were kayaking off the coast of Kaikōura on the south island of New Zealand when a seal, engaged in a battle with an octopus, threw it out of the water at the unsuspecting Mulinder.
“We were just sitting out in the middle of the ocean and then this huge male seal appeared with an octopus and he was thrashing him about for ages,” Mr Mulinder told Yahoo7 News. “He thrashed it in mid-fight and my face happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was like ‘mate, what just happened?’ It was weird because it happened so fast but I could feel all the hard parts of the octopus on my face like ‘dum dum dum’.”
The team works for American tech company GoPro and were testing the latest model of their Hero camera. The camera was installed on the front of their kayak, which gave the world a front row seat to this funny footage.
“We were trying to shoot some cute seals but it ended up being very brutal. We weren’t frightened but we definitely got surprised for sure,“ Taiyo Masuda, who uploaded the video on his Instagram, told BBC News.
Kaikōura is an excellent location to spot marine wildlife, and is especially famous for its population of male sperm whales. Although sperm whales are spread out across the world, only the adult males tend to reach higher latitudes such as New Zealand. The area also has dolphins and, as we know, “aggressive” seals. Seals mostly feed on fish, but they are not against a bit of octopus now and again.
In this case, the seal in question didn’t get its meal. By throwing the octopus out of the water, possibly to rip off one of its limbs, it gave the cephalopod the chance to escape. The octopus latched itself onto the kayak and subsequently had to be removed by one of the instructors. Still, it escaped the seal.
[H/T: Yahoo7 News]
