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Comment by wood_spirit | Hacker News Reader

The context of this showing up on HN made me kinda assumed it was a chatgpt generated thing.

A quick google shows it seems to be a well known classic hoax from the late 90s.

But there really are crabs and lobsters that live in trees and things, as do lots of type of mollusc (eg slugs and snails). So it isn’t completely silly.

So it’s not like a tree octopus is any more ridiculous than the coconut crab?

It seems there is no good way to know the truth anymore, as searching the internet might just find collaborating lies and conjecture…

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> So it’s not like a tree octopus is any more ridiculous than the coconut crab?

It is a lot more ridiculous though because land crabs are a well known thing (e.g. hermit crabs) whereas land octopuses don't exist. Octopuses are very much a water-only type of organism.

It just requires a little prior knowledge about the broad strokes of animalian orders.

Octopuses are molluscs, and there are lots of land living molluscs, right?

To make things even more murky, some octopuses can actually breathe air out of water (which I knew prior to seeing the page), so I was actually semi-fooled by the article as well. An arboreal octopus is actually not that far-fetched.

>Octopuses are very much a water-only type of organism.

They're not though. Octopi generally don't like being out of water, but they're capable of traveling on land short distances and in fact the Abdopus Aculeatus octopus regularly goes on land by choice in order to hunt crabs in different tidepools. Sir David Attenborough discusses the octopus here, which this octopus was one of the animals featured in The Hunt documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebeNeQFUMa0

People learn new things all the time, but an octopus that lives in trees would probably be pretty famous.

> The context of this showing up on HN made me kinda assumed it was a chatgpt generated thing.

It's very likely OP discovered it through the link on this HN post that was at the top yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36739920

Yeah, this occurred to me too. Guess we'll likely be inundated with 90's websites for a few days.

I hope so

I asked midjourney for photos of the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus and the results were impressive. Time to update the sightings page of the website.

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