By the time the staff at New Zealand’s National Aquarium
noticed that he was missing, telltale suction cup prints were the main clue to
an easily-solved mystery.
Inky had said see ya to his tank-mate, slipped through a
gap left by maintenance workers at the top of his enclosure and, as evidenced
by the tracks, made his way across the floor to a six-inch-wide drain. He
squeezed his football-sized body in — octopuses are very malleable, aquarium
manager Rob Yarrall told the New Zealand website Stuff — and made a break for
the Pacific.
“He managed to make his way to one of the drain holes that
go back to the ocean. And off he went,” Yarrall told Radio New Zealand. “And he
didn’t even leave us a message.”
The cephalopod version of “Shawshank Redemption” took place
three months ago, but it only became public Tuesday. Inky, who already had some
local renown in the coastal city of Napier, quickly became a global celebrity
cheered on by strangers.
Inky had resided at the aquarium since 2014, when he was
taken in after being caught in a crayfish pot, his body scarred and his arms
injured. The octopus’s name was chosen from nominations submitted to a contest
run by the Napier City Council.
Kerry Hewitt, the aquarium’s curator of exhibits, said at
the time that Inky was “getting used to being at the aquarium” but added that
staff would “have to keep Inky amused or he will get bored.”
Guess that happened.
This isn’t the first time a captive octopus decided to take
matters into its own hands — er, tentacles. In 2009, after a two-spotted
octopus at the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium in California took apart a water
recycling valve, directed a tube to shoot water out of the tank for 10 hours
and caused a massive flood, Scientific American asked octopus expert Jennifer
Mather about the animals’ intelligence and previous such hijinks at aquariums.
“They are very strong, and it is practically impossible to
keep an octopus in a tank unless you are very lucky. … Octopuses simply take
things apart,” Mather said. “I recall reading about someone who had built a
robot submarine to putter around in a large aquarium tank. The octopus got a
hold of it and took it apart piece by piece. There’s a famous story from the
Brighton Aquarium in England 100 years ago that an octopus there got out of its
tank at night when no one was watching, went to the tank next door and ate one
of the lumpfish and went back to his own tank and was sitting there the next
morning.”
Yarrall said the aquarium has no plans to replace Inky, but
it does intend to better secure the tank where now just one octopus remains.
“They are always exploring and they are great escape
artists,” Yarrall said, according to Hawke’s Bay Today. “We’ll be watching the
other one.”
