BC Aquatic Life: How to Find Octopus

One of the most exciting things about diving in BC waters is trying to find an octopus. I think that they are on everybody’s wish list of underwater critters to spot during a dive. The question is how to find them. With a body that allows them to squeeze into any crack in a wall, and the ability to blend in with an surroundings, they could literally be hiding anywhere. I have found them in car tires, bottles, once even in a discarded fin foot pocket.

In some places in BC if you are very lucky you can find them just out in the open. Even here they ate hard to spot as they are masters of camouflage, blending in with the rocks, sand and seabed. The best way to find them is to look for boulders that are not boulders. Their bodies will move in a rhythmic pattern as they move water through their blow holes to breath. This subtle pulsating movement can catch your eye and help you discover one.

Octopus tend to be nocturnal, in that they mostly come out at night to hunt and explore. Most places in BC they hide during the day in cracks, either natural ones like in the rocks or man made ones like a car tire. We call those places they hide dens. An octopus hanging out in his rocky den we call a cracktopus. But how to find their dens and spot them is the question…

The easiest way to find one is to look for a trail of broken up crab exoskeletons. Octopus are messy eaters and their favourite meal are crabs. After catching a crab and bringing it back to it’s den they expel the part of the crab they can’t eat through their blow holes outside their den. Often times if you find a little pile of discarded crab shells, follow the trail and look around and you might just find an octopus den. If you are looking along a wall make sure to look up, as the den is probably high above the crab debris which has fallen down when it was thrown out by the octopus. Once you find the den, if you are lucky there might just be an octopus inside!

The two most common octopus to find in BC are the Giant Pacific Octopus or GPO, and the Red Pacific Octopus. The Red Pacific Octopus often gets falsely Identified as a juvenile GPO as they are a lot smaller. A great book to learn more about octopus is Super Suckers, which is available to buy for from Rowand's Reef.

Now you know how to find an octopus, make sure to come along to our club dives for the opportunity to look for one. Although rare you can find them in our local dive sites, and they are found often at Whytecliff Park (where you can also find baby juvenile octopus) , Kelvin Grove (where we have found some HUGE GPOs out in the open), and Porteau Cove (where they love to crawl into and hide in the tires and wreck debris or the reef).