Octopus Expert Reacts to Viral Octopus Riding a Shark (and More)
🚨🐙 Stage 8 Clinger Alert! From high-stakes shark rodeos to choking out dolphins, octopus expert and OctoNation founder Warren Carlyle breaks down the clingy tactics that keep these brains-with-suction-cups off the menu (sometimes 😅).
Caught on Camera: Octopus Riding a Shark
By now, you’ve probably seen the viral video: A giant orange Māori octopus clinging to a shark like it’s auditioning for Shark Week: Underwater Rodeo Edition. 🤠 (short clip) ⤵️
The Internet’s Response to Octopus Riding a Shark Clip:
“Bruh got himself an Uber!”
“Octopus: Whelp, I’m your backpack now”
“Wait…was this clip in My Octopus Teacher’s Extended Cut? haha”
“Hold up! Sharktopus IRL?!”
“Once other sharks see that hat, they’re ALL gonna want one!” 🤭
Ok ok ok lets reel it back in OctoNation!
Why is this octopus riding a shark?
Sure, these responses are hilarious, but I haven’t seen many articles actually explain what the heck is actually goin on. *cracks knuckles* Until now…
Long story short: When you’re a soft-bodied genius in a sea full of toothy, bitey, slurpy things…you CLING first, ask questions later.
Long story long: Keep readin’
Sometimes clinging isn’t desperate—it’s genius.
Octopuses aren’t just clever—they’re expert survivalists.
And they have to be—when you’re a floating protein bar on nearly every predator’s menu, smarts aren’t really optional.
(We’ve got a blog on the biological marvels of octopus suckers, If you wanna nerd out on how powerful and smart they are, it’s worth a read!)
But for now, let’s get into why the octopus is clinging to the shark’s head.
Anatomy of the Perfect Cling
Octopus suckers can form a vacuum seal on almost anything—rocks, coral, shark skin, you name it. How? Radial muscles flatten the sucker against a surface, pushing out water and creating a tight seal—kind of like pressing a suction cup onto a window. Circular muscles act like drawstrings on a hoodie to lock it in place, and meridional muscles run up and down the sucker like lines on a pumpkin (see below), tightening or loosening the whole system depending on whether it’s time to cling or dip out.
See those circular lines on the sucker below? (They kind of look like tree rings, right?) Those are muscle layers that can flex around textured surfaces and hold tight through turbulence.
What might at first look like a simple suction cup—like the ones stuck to your shower caddy—is actually a self-adjusting sensory system. Each sucker responds to touch, tension, pressure, and resistance—all in real time!
Essentially, octopuses can hold on with their suckers like a sugar-charged toddler clinging to a juice box… only way more coordinated.
🧃🐙
Cling or Be Consumed: The Art of Not Getting Eaten
Whether it’s a rock, a scuba diver, or the literal face of a predator, octopuses use their suckered arms as anchors, shields, and weapons.
And get this—they don’t just grab with their suckers… they taste what they touch!
In a split second, an octopus can tell if something is worth turning into dinner—or best left alone.
So when a predator lunges, an octopus might not swim away.
They might cling.
They might ink and vanish.
They might flash, jet, or confuse their way way to freedom and safety.
Still with us? Good. Let’s get into some wild, real-world moments of octopuses outsmarting their predators.
Octopus Shield Mode Activated 🛡️🐙
In this rarely observed footage above, the octopus isn’t clinging—it’s strategically flattening its proximal suckers (the big ones near the beak) and tucking its arms behind its head to shield its limbs.
Eels like this moray bite down, twist, and use torque or ‘rotational feeding’ to rip their prey apart (think crocodile death roll). But with no octo-arms exposed and no easy grip points, the eel’s attack is basically deflected.
Rather than fleeing, the octopus turns its body into a sucker-covered shield—reducing grab points and boosting survival odds!
🌀 Eels Spin to Win (or Escape!)
In a newly researched series of underwater battles, Octopus vulgaris was seen pulling off some next-level defense tactics against conger eels—powerful predators that usually twist their prey into bite-sized chunks.
If the eel managed to grab the octopus by the head or body instead of the arms, game over.
That’s when the eel switched to a hard-to-watch tactic called rotational feeding—spinning its body to tear the octopus apart before the octopus could attempt to choke em’ out.
When grabbed by the arms, the octopus still had a chance for survival. It wrapped its suckered limbs around the eel’s face, blocked its vision, and even latched to the eels gills to cut off their breathing. One octopus kept fighting even after losing multiple arms!
Wild Octopus Fact: 🧠💪
Roughly two-thirds of an octopus’s 500 million neurons are located in their arms—not in the brain. That means even after being severed, those “zombie suckers” can still act like they’re on the clock: gripping, reacting to touch, and sometimes even trying to feed a mouth that’s no longer there. 👻 (Crook & Walters, 2014, Current Biology)
🦈 In the Case of the Clingy Maori Octopus
Let’s talk about the octopus riding a mako shark because honestly, it looked like a deleted scene from a Pixar movie.
But Nope, that’s not Hank. That’s a Māori octopus—one of the largest octopuses in the Southern Hemisphere, known as the muscular beefcake of the octopus world, with front arms that can grow up to 9.8 feet (3 meters). How’s that for a flex?! 💪🐙
To catch you up to speed…
While surveying the Hauraki Gulf near New Zealand’s Kawau Island, marine ecologist Rochelle Constantine and her team from the University of Auckland spotted a shortfin mako shark with something orange stuck to its head. Thinking it was trash or a possible injury, Wednesday Davis launched drones to check it out—only to discover a massive Māori octopus clinging for dear life. The team watched the unlikely duo—soon dubbed “sharktopus”—for ten minutes before the octopus rode off into legend… only to become a viral video a year or so later. 😆🐙🦈
What likely happened:
The shark lunged for lunch. The octopus latched on—not for funsies clearly, but to avoid becoming a snack. With its grip locked tight, the shark couldn’t shake it, so it swam on like an unwilling Uber driver.
But hey!—just to be clear, that doesn’t mean the mako didn’t eventually turn the tables and have Māori octo-tacos for lunch. Sharks, like dolphins, are known to launch themselves out of the water at high speed to stun prey—slamming octopuses against the surface to shake them loose.
Yup. The ocean plays rough—but sometimes the octopus plays rougher. (keep reading!)
Exhibit SEA: a Mako Ctrl+Alt+Yeet’ing itself out of the ocean
🐬 The Brutal Genius Behind Dolphin vs. Octopus Battles
In Shark Bay, Australia, bottlenose dolphins are on to the octopus’s clingy tricks. They don’t just grab and gulp—oh no. They’ve developed a multi-step tenderizing process that looks more like food prep than predation. (Sprogis et al., 2017)
To begin, the dolphin’s “OctoPrep Protocol” involves a violent flurry of tossing and thrashing—sometimes 10 to 15 times—until the octopus’s body is disoriented and its sucker-lined arms stop fighting back. Then comes the disassembly: limbs ripped, beak discarded, ink expelled. Only once the octopus has been thoroughly prepped… do dolphins dine.
Figure 1 from Complex prey handling of octopus by bottlenose dolphins
And it has to be this brutal. Octopus arms don’t just shrivel when detached—they fight. Even severed, they can grip, react, and choke. In fact, dolphins have died trying to swallow octopuses too soon. (viewer digression advised) The stakes are serious!
Dolphins have been observed doing even more complex food prep with cuttlefish—ramming them into the sand with their nose, draining their ink sacs, ejecting their cuttlebones bones…a full-blown multi-step sashimi ritual. If they’re handling octopuses with anything close to that level of precision? Whew😅. We’re talking about prep work that rivals Michelin-starred kitchens folks!
It’s clear that Dolphins can’t just wing it with an octopus; they’ve gotta step-by-step system, passed down through generations. What looks like chaos is actually technique—taught, practiced, and perfected in their pods.
Ancient Octopus Fact: The dolphins’ octo-flinging-banging-bashing behavior looks oddly reminiscent of ancient Greek fishing techniques (tenderizing octopuses on rocks). Aristotle wrote about it in his book Historia Animalium nearly 2,400 years ago. He described how fishermen struggled to dislodge the octopus’s stubborn grip—even with a knife. This was long before researchers ever caught dolphins doing the same with their snouts against sand and the water’s surface.
Below: Fisherman tenderizing octopus
And now we have to ask: Who learned from who?! 🐬👀🐙
💡 Are Humans Inspired by the Octopus Cling?
Oh heck yeah, engineers are taking serious notes—like the research team behind a newly developed octopus-inspired adhesive that can grip and release in underwater environments on command, even on rough, curved, or slippery surfaces. For practical use, think shipwreck recovery, medical procedures, and underwater robots. They’re designed to mimic the part of the octopus sucker that does all the gripping—the soft, muscular rim that flexes to seal tight on just about anything: the infundibulum.
The design includes a curved stalk and a flexible surface that bends and molds to whatever it touches, allowing the adhesive to create and release suction—just like an octopus arm.
It can latch onto slippery, jagged, or irregular objects with a grip strength over 60 kPa— Try holding a gallon of milk (8 lbs) upside down, balanced on something the size of a soda can top—that’s the kind of force we’re talking about per sucker. And it can switch suction on or off in under 30 milliseconds (Lee et al., 2024).
From deep-sea ROV specimen collections to minimally invasive surgery, octo-cling technology could shape the future—proving that nature’s been solving complex problems for millions of years. We humans are just finally catching up!
So now you’re up to speed, you brilliant octopus fan—octopuses riding sharks and this clingy octopus behavior isn’t some modern-day mystery. It’s just another day in the life of a squishy genius doing whatever it takes to not end up as lunch.
Whether it’s latching onto a predator’s face, blocking an eel’s gills, or flattening its suckers into a full-body shield—octopuses have been perfecting the art of not-getting-eaten since…forever.
Next time someone sends you a octopus-clinging-to-anything video, drop them a link to this blog!
And hey—congrats. Your Octo-IQ just leveled wayyyyy up. 🧠🐙📈
Warren Carlyle is an internationally recognized octopus expert and founder of OctoNation, the world’s largest octopus fan club and nonprofit organization dedicated to octopus education.
Dubbed the “OctoKing” by Sy Montgomery and featured as a co-author on National Geographic’s SecretsOfTheOctopus.com, Warren has spent over a decade making octopus science accessible and entertaining for all ages.
As the Octopus’ PR agent, Warren regularly collaborates with hundreds of underwater photographers, marine scientists, artists, and aquarists to create engaging, research-backed content that reaches millions monthly.
As Jacques Cousteau said, “People protect what they love.”OctoNation’s community of over 1 million members couldn’t agree more. 🐙Want to get involved? Email Warren at [email protected]
