GIG HARBOR — While she was walking along Austen Park near Donkey Creek, Gig Harbor resident Ann Webb spotted a rare sea animal Oct. 3. It was a giant Pacific octopus.
“My husband Jonathan and I were walking down the path and saw something red,” Webb told the Gateway Thursday.
They continued to watch it as it slowly moved down the edge of the creek, she said.
“We followed it for 10 minutes before it went into the end of the harbor and disappeared,” Webb said. “It was mesmerizing.”
At one point when they got too close it camouflaged itself to match the vegetation in the creek, she said.
She took a video of the octopus in the water and uploaded it to a community Facebook group, Gig Harbor Town Talk.
A friend then tagged Rachel Easton, the education director at Harbor WildWatch, in the post.
“Of course I went down there right away,” Easton told the Gateway Thursday.
Easton searched, but was too late to see the octopus for herself.
She reached out to Webb for the video and posted it to Harbor WildWatch’s TikTok account.
Why was the octopus in the creek?
There are a couple of reasons why the octopus could have been in the creek: it’s semelparous or got sucked in during high tide.
The giant Pacific octopus is semelparous, meaning that they die after they spawn.
“My guess is that it was a male,” Easton said. “Because females stay in a den somewhere to care for the eggs that they lay, and then once they’ve hatched they die.”
They reproduce once and then they die.
But males are a little different. As soon as they transfer their sperm to a female they senescence
“Senescence is when they lose their fear of shallow water and bright lights,” Easton said. “So they kind of just wander around until usually something eats them.”
It’s a normal stage of the octopus life cycle that often occurs before death.
Easton believes this was likely what happened to the octopus seen Oct. 3.
Another possibility is that at night, during high tide or early in the morning, it wandered into the creek.
“The area the octopus was in is kind of this mixing area of the estuary,” Easton said.
Saltwater on a high tide inundates that area and then at low tide it’s freshwater.
The octopus could have gone into the creek with a saltwater high tide to investigate, being curious, Easton said.
“But, then as the tide went out, the saltwater, the salinity of the water would have decreased and become full strength freshwater,” Easton said.
Freshwater is not something an octopus can tolerate. They can’t breathe.
It could have been a healthy octopus that wandered in with saltwater and when it changed to freshwater it left.
Easton thought this was also possible since the video shows it moving away from the creek, back toward the bay.
Are octopus unusual in the creek?
The only other time Easton observed an octopus in the creek was in 2014.
“That year, we got a call from the Harbor History Museum that there was an octopus in the creek,” Easton said.
That octopus was about the size of a basketball, but wasn’t moving. It was just curled up, not active.
“Back then we theorized that it probably was a male and senescence after mating, but no confirmation of that and we didn’t keep track of it,” Easton said.
