Gotta get me home to my baby’s side. Ride, ride, ride, hitchin’ a ride. Photo: YouTube//Screenshot
One indicator of intelligence is figuring out ways to conserve energy. Humans made the wheel, domesticated working animals like horses, moved onto various forms of leg powered cycles, created the combustion engine, and then made finally cars and airplanes and spaceships. Even though geese are not what we, in our arrogance, would call “intelligent”, they fly in formation to reduce wind resistance. While the octopus is surely a very intelligent creature, it hasn’t yet figured out how to travel around the ocean under something else’s power. Or has it? In this video, shot in December, 2023, an octopus can be seen apparently hitching a ride on a shark.
The University of Auckland recently released the strange bit of footage, where an octopus can be seen on the back of a shortfin mako. Aside from the obvious, it’s what researchers called a “mysterious sight indeed” because octopuses generally hang around on the seabed, and makos aren’t big fans of the bottom of the ocean, choosing instead to spend most of their time in the open water.
The sighting happened in the Hauraki Gulf near Kawau Island, while the University of Auckland’s research team was searching for shark feeding frenzies as part of an ongoing project.
When they spotted a mako, they went in for a closer look. That’s when they saw the lump of orange on its back and decided to send a drone up to get a view from above.
“The octopus may have been in for quite the experience,” said Professor Rochelle Constantine, “since the world’s fastest shark species can reach 50 kph.”
The team watched for ten minutes before heading off, and the little octopus clung to the shark’s back for the entire time. It’s hard to imagine a scenario where the seabed dwelling octopus — which can be prey for a mako shark — would have the chance to get on the shark’s back, but it was likely a predation event gone wrong, followed by a desperate gambit for survival on the octopus’s part.
