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In 2013, a Tumblr user responded to an animated GIF of an octopus escaping an enclosure through a narrow hole by describing an anecdote they had heard from a friend about how a disgruntled octopus once threw a spoiled shrimp at its handler: The user included the following video in the comment: https://youtu.be/949eYdEz3EsAlthough the video is real (it was filmed by a marine biology student named Raymond Deckel at the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences in 2012), we have not found any evidence to support the viral anecdote that accompanies it. This Tumblr post begins with a bit of a red flag in terms of plausibility as this Tumblr user states that they are relaying a story that they were told by a friend who supposedly heard about it when reading an article. As anyone who has played a game of Telephone can understand, the original message can get lost in translation as it passes from one speaker to the next. In fact, this anecdote has evolved a bit as it has circulated online. Here's a 2019 Reddit post in which the shrimp changes to a fish: This viral anecdote is also sorely lacking in details. When did this incident take place? At what aquarium? What was the handler's name? What type of octopus? Despite the fact that this anecdote was presented without any evidence in the comments of a Tumblr page in 2013, this piece of octopus lore has continued to circulate on social media. In 2021, eight years after this comment was originally posted, this anecdote was still being shared on social media sites such as Facebook and iFunny. Culum Brown, a professor with the Department of Biological Sciences at Macquarie University in Australia, told us that he had never heard this anecdote and that he finds it unlikely in the extreme: Dr. Jenny Hofmeister, an Environmental Scientist at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife who posts on social media under the @Dr_Octopod handle, also told us that this story wasn't credible. Hofmeister said that while it was plausible that an octopus would reject food, and that it was possible that an octopus would escape its tank, it was highly unlikely that an octopus would seek down its caretaker to hurl a shrimp at them in an act of spite. When we tried to trace this tale back to its origins (what article did this friend supposedly read?), we found a similar anecdote in the 2002 book The Octopus and the Orangutan: More True Tales of Animal Intrigue, Intelligence, and Ingenuity by Eugene Linden. Linden wrote about one experience of Jean Boal, a biologist specializing in octopus behavior at Millersville University in Pennsylvania, while feeding a group of California mud flat octopuses (note: Boal's surname was misspelled Baul in the published version of this passage): Several other anecdotes seemingly show the intelligence of the octopus (none, however, appear to involve an octopus escaping its tank to track down its handler and throw a spoiled a shrimp at them). An octopus named Otto at the Sea Star Aquarium in Germany, for example, would cause power outages by squirting water at the lights. The aquarium's director Elfriede Kummer talked to reporter Andrea Seabrook on NPR's All Things Considered about Otto the octopus: In sum: There doesn't appear to be any available evidence to support the claim that an octopus once escaped its tank, crawled down a hallway, and threw a spoiled shrimp in disgust at its handler. This viral anecdote appears to be an exaggerated version of an anecdote in which an octopus stuffed a shrimp down a drain that was relayed by a biologist in a 2002 book about animal intelligence.
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