Most of the time they are yellow or sand in color, but bright blue rings appear on their body when they are about to attack. They will strike only if they feel threatened. If a blue-ringed octopus bites you, you need to get medical treatment right away, as your bites can be fatal in a short time. Octopuses have sharp beaks and can produce poisonous stings.
The bite of the Pacific Giant Octopus will not only hurt, but it will also inject poison into its target (although this poison is not deadly). A blue-ringed octopus is one of the most dangerous animals in the ocean. Its bite can be fatal to humans. However, very few people have died from the bite of a blue-ringed octopus.
These octopuses are not aggressive and tend to stand alone unless attacked. Made of hard chitin (just like the material of crab exoskeletons, for example), this octopus beak actually looks a lot like that of a parrot, as you can see in this image of a giant squid's beak below. The finding helps explain a long-standing mystery about how exactly octopuses hunt and kill, said study leader Bryan Fry, a poison researcher in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Melbourne. Although octopus bodies are soft and boneless, they have hard beaks made of chitin, the same substance that forms the exoskeletons of arthropods such as insects, spiders and crustaceans, Trautwein told Live Science in an email.
As seen in the video, the octopus approaches a group of divers who were swimming near the bottom of the ocean and with flashlights on. Fortunately, the Pacific Giant Octopus is known to be quite shy and generally friendly to humans, rarely using its dangerous characteristics to inflict damage. With three hearts, nine brains and eight arms, octopuses seem equipped to tackle almost any task they decide on. Although blue-ringed octopus stings are known to be life-threatening, bites from most octopus species are generally not problematic.
The driver is easily separated from the octopus, which quickly returns to the ground to camouflage itself. Before she could put it back in the water, the octopus bites her on the back of her left hand three times in the same place. The woman was in a local fishing derby where she saw that a fellow fisherman had caught a small octopus, which could be a young giant Pacific octopus (Enteroctopus dofleini), or a Pacific red octopus (Octopus rubescens). If you or someone you know has been bitten by a blue-ringed octopus, call 911 or activate the local emergency medical service in the area immediately.
There are not many reports that octopus injure humans; they tend to avoid humans and many attacks have not been verified. In the 1950s and 1960s, a popular sport to play was called “octopus wrestling”, in which a diver grabbed an octopus and tried to drag it to the surface. In Washington, a woman who placed a baby octopus (believed to be a Giant Pacific) on her face for a photo was bitten and injected with poison. A blue-ringed octopus is one of several species of small octopus that show small, bright blue rings on their body when they are alarmed.
