To support their bodies, these spineless animals — invertebrates — have skeletons made of protein fibres. This flexibility can be a real advantage when slipping into nooks and crannies for protection and making a home in seemingly impossible places.
On the east side of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada, there is an area called Madrona Point where beneath the surface of the sea many octopus have done just that. This is the home of the Giant Pacific Octopus, Enteroctopus dofleini, the largest known octopus species.
The land above is the home of the Snuneymuxw First Nation of the Coast Salish who live here, on the Gulf Islands, and along the Fraser River. They speak Hul'q'umin'um' — a living language that expresses their worldview and way of life. In Hul'q'umin'um' an octopus is sqi'mukw'.
In the Kwak̓wala language of the Kwakiutl or Kwakwaka'wakw, speakers of Kwak'wala, further north on Vancouver Island, octopus or devil fish are known as ta̱k̕wa. I have seen them off the coast of Port Hardy but most of my encounters have been around the mid-island while underwater myself.
I have scuba dived at Madrone Point many times and visited the octopus who squeeze into the eroded sections of a sandstone ledge about 18 metres or 60 feet below the surface. After forty days of mating, the female Giant Pacific Octopus attaches strings of small fertilized eggs to the rocks within these crevices and calls it home for a time — generally five months or 160 days. When I visit, I sometimes bring crab or sea urchin for her to snack on as the mothers guarding these eggs do not leave to hunt, staying ever vigilante protecting their brood from predators.
Octopus are soft-bodied, eight-limbed molluscs of the order Octopoda. The order consists of some 300 species and is grouped within the class Cephalopoda with squids, cuttlefish, and nautiloids.
The oldest fossil octopus at 300 million years old is Pohlsepia mazonensis from Carboniferous Mazon Creek fossil beds in Illinois. The only known specimen resembles modern octopuses with the exception of possessing eight arms and two tentacles (Kluessendorf and Doyle 2000).
