Octopus With 85 Tentacles

Heres something you don’t see everyday, an octopus with 85 tentacles! It’s very uncommon to find octopi with more than 8 tentacles, which makes this creature extremely rare.

If that doesn’t impress you, how about one with 96 tentacles?

via Pink Tenticle

From The Table of Adam Guy – “Madako”, Japanese Octopus

I’ve been very busy these past few weeks traveling and working, but I’ve got some great content coming from my brief stay in Maui, and as soon as I can find the time I’ll get it all posted here. Meanwhile Adam Guy and I were chatting, he’s a great source for all things Japanese, and he told me that he had another food article ready to go. So back again, another installment in the growing “From The Table of Adam Guy” series, another mouth-watering meal.

And be sure to check out some of the other great contributions from Adam like, Japanese Cuttlefish, Japanese Flounder, and Fugu.

Adam writes:

Summer for Tokyo fishermen means octopus fishing by day, and night-fishing for Japanese conger eel. The octopus known in Japanese as “madako” (Octopus vulgaris, Common octopus) is cherished as a delicacy, eaten commonly as sashimi or served boiled as a celebratory dish for New Year’s.

To catch such octopus, one employs a special tackle comprising a hooked, weighted wooden board about eight inches in length, to which a crab is tied, upside-down. Octopi apparently have a great weakness for crab, particularly those with their vulnerable underbelly exposed to attack. The baited device is lowered into the water using a thick nylon/polyester line, and then jigged up-and-down by hand on the seafloor. Octopus usually feel the bait with their tentacles before launching themselves onto it, and this can be felt in one’s hands as a sort of ‘sticking’ feeling. On feeling the ‘stickiness’ on the line becoming much heavier, signalling the octopus actually attaching itself to the bait and starting to feed, a violent and large yank upwards on the line with both one’s hands sets the hooks into the creature and then it is a slow process of hauling in the line by hand to the surface.

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