And you thought we were joking about the Octopus threat?

Earli­er this month we read about an octopus off the South Coast that mugged an inno­cent diver and took his valu­able new cam­era. The news flashed around the world and every­one had a bit of a chuckle at the diver­’s expense.

Not so fast, laugh­ing boys (and girls).

It turns out that this is but the latest epis­ode in a long his­tory of crim­in­al beha­viour by the city’s ceph­alo­pod cit­izenry.

We need only look at anoth­er, earli­er encounter between a Wel­ling­to­ni­an and a rogue octopus to prove the point. An encounter that, just like our earli­er story made world head­lines… but back in 1888.

Read on, after the jump.

Appear­ing in the New York Times in Decem­ber 1888 (reprin­ted from the Pall Mall Gaz­ette, a fore­run­ner of Lon­don’s Even­ing Stand­ard) is this eer­ily famil­i­ar story:

A man named Alex­an­der McGov­an, engaged in the Wel­ling­ton (New Zea­l­and) har­bor improve­ment works, […] went down in his diving dress for the pur­pose of set­ting some large blocks under the water in which piles had pre­vi­ously been driv­en. As McGov­an was in the act of pla­cing one of the blocks, he was seized by an enorm­ous octopus.

The report goes on to detail the ter­rible struggle between McGov­an and the giant octopus (which later turned out to have tentacles over two and a half metres long). The diver found that “the more he fought with the octopus the more he found that it was use­less, as its grip became stronger”.

It was only when McGov­an stopped strug­gling, and sub­mit­ted him­self to the tentacu­lar embrace of the hyper-aggress­ive octo­pod, that he was even­tu­ally able to get his work­mates to haul him out of the water.

So there we have it. Assault. Lar­ceny. Graf­fiti. Tentacles. They’re bad. Very bad.

In fact, they’re prob­ably out there now, plot­ting how to get the gar­age doors open all along The Esplanade so they can steal some cars and go cruis­ing for more humans to meas­ure their tentacles against… or worse.

Some­thing Must Be Done.

And in the mean­time we have to con­clude that, while it’s a ter­rible thing to judge an entire spe­cies on just a few bad apples, it’s clear that the only good octopus is the one on your plate.

In tasty, tasty, little pieces.