Video: Octopus Chokes Bottlenose Dolphin to Death Trying to Swallow it Whole
OutdoorHub Reporters 01.18.18
A bottlenose dolphin off the coast of Australia was in the process of enjoying a hearty octopus meal, when the meal fought back . . .
Octopi have always been a part of dolphin’s diet, so you think they would know better not to try and swallow one whole. But, when a young male dolphin was found on a beach and taken back to a lab in Perth, Australia, it appears that’s what got the mammal killed.
According to National Geographic, Nahiid Stephens, a pathologist at Murdoch University, observed the dolphin and was in charge of running a post-mortem exam to solve what went wrong – what he discovered is really mind blowing, and kind of unsettling at the same time.
The first thing Stephens had to do, was get the octopus out of the dolphins throat . . .
“It really was a huge octopus, I just kept pulling and pulling and thought, ‘My God! It’s still coming,'” Stephens said.
At the conclusion of his exam, Stephens determined that while on the way down to the dolphin’s stomach, the 4.6 pound cephalopod made a last ditch effort, and latched onto the dolphin’s larynx with its nearly 5-foot-long tentacles. This made breathing essentially impossible, and the dolphin suffocated to death.
Talk about bizarre, but just to add onto the creepy factor, Stephens added that the octopus was likely already dead when it fought back, but the suckers on its long tentacles were still functional – ick!
