THE HARASSED OCTOPUS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 659, 22 February 1952, Page 17

THE HARASSED OCTOPUS

Spotlights on Nature from 3YA ‘THE biggest sucker in the world is the octopus, and he’s had more raw deals put over on him than anything else on eight legs. So states his defence counsel, Reg Williams, in the first of his four-talk series, Spotlights on Nature. Not that the jet-propelled clinger is a beauty by any standards, but for pure innocence in the face of unfair discrimination the octopus has all other deepsea monsters licked. He is, according to Mr. Williams, "a timid, retiring, harassed creature that will never cause trouble to a human being unless he is first molested or disturbed," and yet he has managed to head most people’s nightmare lists for a long time. But, as the author explains, even with the armament odds four to one in favour of the cephalopod, a good counter-attack by the biped can dispose of the octopus and send him on his way like a Canberra on test run, This knowledge is invaluable in view of the fact that some of the prize specimens of the race live in the pleasantly adjacent Cook Strait area. The whole trouble is that octopes (octopi is said to be on the way out) have a trick of looking like lumps of ocean bottom and therefore frequently get themselves stomped on by clumsy tourists. As Mr. Williams justly points out, "no self-respecting octopus appreciates having his face trampled on." To disengage from the embrace of a downtrodden octopus is simple enough, but Mr. Williams has the secret, and those interested-it’s the sort of knowledge than can come in handy practically any . time--can receive instructions by listening to 3YA at 7.15 p.m. on Friday, :-February 29,

At the same hour on the three following Friday evenings, Mr. Williams will take up the subjects of "The Tuatara," an advocate’ of longevity and the simple life; "The Story of the Barnacle," a novel with a stiff cover; and "Lost for Sixty Million Years," a study of living creatures "whose ancestry disappears back into the dim mists of antiquity and who could be most fittingly described as ‘living fossils.’" This serves to introduce our cover-fish, Latimeria Chalumnae, a member of the Coelacanth group thought to haye become extinct some 50,000,000 years ago, but dredged from oceanic depths off the coast of South Africa in 1938. A cousin of sorts of the Australian lung-fish, Latimeria belongs to an order of fringe-finned fish that declined in social popularity during the Cretaceous period, and had been known, up until 1938, only as the inhabitant of fossil-bearing rocks. A man who quite clearly knows just what he is talking about, Mr. Williams has the knack of making laymen know it also; he does not dazzle them with science but presents his four talks in|: such a way that they become amusing and highly informative glances at some of the lesser known aspects of nature. (For. more information on marine natural history, turn to page 7.) =