Don't Mess With Me: The Strange Lives of Venomous Sea Creatures
To Susan life companion adventurer and dive buddy P E To Candace my best friend and wife A M
DON’T BE FOOLED The stinging tentacles of a tube anemone swirl in ocean currents The more than 9,000 varieties of stinging sea jellies anemones and corals look as if they wouldn’t harm a fly ing fish Most of the nearly 3,000 venomous venomous fish species appear anything but dangerous But don’t mess with them That doesn’t mean you need to stay out of the ocean After all we share the land with many more venomous creatures than live in the sea Land-based arthropods alone include more than 40,000 species of spiders most of them venomous plus tens of thousands of stinging bee wasp and ant species yet that doesn’t keep us indoors Still animals evolved first in the oceans and the venomous creatures that swim glide scuttle slither and lurk beneath the waves have had hundreds of millions of years to invent powerful toxins and amazingly clever ways to eat and avoid being eaten
BLUE-RINGED OCTOPUS Timid but Deadly In the warm tropical waters of the wide Pacific Ocean a tiny octopus its body not much bigger than a walnut creeps across a coral reef Nearby a crab armed with sharp powerful claws is ready to attack any intruder The octopus inches closer to the crab Is it sliding into a death trap Not likely The octopus brings a decisive weapon to this encounter a deadly neurotoxin neurotoxin produced by bacteria living in its salivary glands The eight-armed mollusk grabs the crustacean and bites through its shell with a bird-like beak Lethal venom seeps into the crab and shuts down its nervous system It can’t move its muscles Its fearsome claws become useless Its gills no longer absorb life-giving oxygen from seawater The octopus feasts on a fresh seafood dinner 4
A blue-ringed octopus grabs a crab dinner off Bali Indonesia DON’T MESS Timid and reclusive except when feeding the greater blue-ringed octopus glides across coral reefs in the waters of Sri Lanka Australia New Guinea Indonesia Indonesia the Philippines and southern Japan Measuring less than 8 inches 20 cm from arm tip to arm tip this little animal can kill a person with its venomous bite It eats shrimp small crabs bivalve mollusks and fish and tries to avoid being eaten by moray eels some of which appear to be immune to the toxin The colors of a blue-ringed octopus intensify with excitement as the predator reaches around a rock to attack a crab
