Watch This Octopus Straight-Up Punch a Grouper in the Face (Video)

Remember My Octopus Teacher?

The 2020 Netflix doco, which captured a lonely South African man, who hops in the ocean every day, and strikes up a borderline uncomfortable relationship with an octopus – or as the tagline reads, “[he] meets a female octopus who casts a spell on him.”

It’s weird, yet a tearjerker, in case you haven’t seen it. And it shows what science and anecdotal evidence have long considered: that octopi (yeah, I said it) are very intelligent creatures. Below, here’s another example, giving credence to such intellect.

Or maybe not so much brainpower. Perhaps cheekiness?

It shows an octopus in the South Pacific Ocean – on the seafloor at Morton Bank, around 75 miles off the coast of Rotuma (an island group around 400 miles north of Fiji – using one of its eight arms to slap, punch, clock, etc. a passing grouper fish.

But why?

Apparently, it’s common behavior for our eight-legged underwater friends. National Geographic’s Eduardo Sampaio even published on study on it.

“The active predators, like the goatfish, are the ones that find the food,” then the octopus “basically unlocks the food for everyone,” Sampaio said. “If the group is moving, everyone’s happy. It’s all good.”

But then, when the natural flow of the hunt for food gets disrupted, the octopus steps in and puts everyone back in line – and it’s almost always the grouper fish that’s the problem.

“Half of the times [a grouper is] present, it’s getting punched,” said Sampaio, whose study appeared September 23 in Nature Ecology & Evolution. “So, it’s clearly an animal that the octopus understands is not collaborating.”

Octopi: incredibly smart, yet also, a bit feisty.

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