Octopus Nabs Crab on Land in Striking Footage

As the saying goes, in life sometimes you're the octopus and sometimes you're the crab. OK, so that's not a terribly common saying -- perhaps instead we could say that sometimes you're shooting video of a crab and an octopus jumps out of the water to eat your subject.

That's what happened in Yallingup, western Australia to Porsche Indrisie. Ms. Indrisie was "randomly filming" a yellow crab in a rock pool, she wrote on her Youtube account, when a crafty octopus lurking just underneath the surface noticed the potential meal at the water's edge and sprang into action.

As seen in the footage below, the octopus pounces on the crab unawares -- steering clear of the crab's claws -- and then drags it backward across the rocks and into the water, where the shell-shocked crustacean doubtless becomes lunch for the multi-armed predator.

How soft octopi kill hard crabs, a regular feature of their diet, is fascinating and grisly. As displayed in this video from Howstuffworks, an octopus first reels in a crab with its suckered arms. Then it bites the crab with its beak, paralyzes it with venom, and gorges on the unlucky creature's innards. All that's left after the meal is an empty shell that used to have a crab in it.

Sometimes, in life, you're the crab that should have been more careful.

Read more at Discovery News