TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — A Taiwanese fisherman on Thursday (March 25) caught a rare "seven-armed octopus," prompting warnings that it could be poisonous, while experts debated what species it is.
At 2:18 a.m. on Thursday, a fisherman posted a photo of the seven-armed octopus and three small fish he caught that day on the Facebook page Central Fishing Information Agency (中區釣魚資訊社). The caption simply read, "Fish catch on a rainy day."
However, in the comments section below a fisherman warned, "Dangerous ... Photo 1 can't be eaten." When another angler asked why not, the original commentator said, "it's poisonous."
The image was then posted on Baofei Commune (爆廢公社) by a netizen who claimed that it was an argonaut, also known as a paper nautilus. He worried about the safety of the fisherman and admonished those who go fishing for failing to "recognize poisonous creatures."
Li Kun-hsuan (李坤瑄), an assistant researcher at the National Museum of Natural Science, was cited by SET News as saying that based on the photo, he believes the creature to be a blanket octopus. Li said that argonauts have a thin shell and a specimen of the species was caught by divers in Kenting last year.
He said argonauts have paralytic agents in their salivary glands and people usually suffer from pain, redness, and swelling on the bite area. Li said that traditionally, Penghu fishermen consider the argonaut to be inedible and poisonous.
Blanket octopuses, however, are not venomous. Instead, they have the unusual characteristic of being immune to the venom of Portuguese man of war jellyfish, the tentacles of which they rip off to use as defensive weapons. Some fishermen on the original Facebook post said the blanket octopus does not taste good and is not worth eating.
A true seven-arm octopus (Haliphron atlanticus) is one of the ocean's biggest species of octopus. While these are referred to as septopods, blanket octopuses and argonauts are usually eight-limbed.
Seven-armed octopus caught on Thursday. (Facebook, Central Fishing Information Agency photo)
