The octopus, probably unimpressed about being on someone's face, dished out a couple of painful bites and injected some venom into the wound. We're sure you can see where this is going. These cephalopods eat anything from fish to crabs, so their beaks can handle some pretty tough crunching. (Smithsonian Institution/Wikimedia) The beak and muscles combined can give a good chomp if the octopus needs to. Made out of hard chitin (same as the stuff in crab exoskeletons, for example), this octopus beak actually looks a lot like a parrot's, as you can see in this picture of a giant squid's beak below.
The beak sits inside a section called the buccal mass, which is the first part of their simple digestive system, and is surrounded by the muscly arm appendages. Octopuses ( no, not octopi) might look squishy, and they mostly are, but the eight-armed animals also have a secret weapon in the middle of all those tentacles – a scissor-like beak. She was apparently going to eat it for dinner, but before that, decided it was a great time for a photo opportunity and – we're saying this again - placed the octopus on her face. The woman was at a local fishing derby where she saw that a fellow fisher had caught a small octopus, which could be a young giant Pacific octopus ( Enteroctopus dofleini), or a Pacific red octopus ( Octopus rubescens).
Especially when it comes to the way we treat living, breathing, animals.Īnd so, as many news organisations have been reporting, we come to the story of a fishing enthusiast in Washington state who found an octopus and - yes, you know what's coming - put it on her face.