Find other great podcasts like this one at podmoth.network. Hey everybody, welcome to... what did we decide to call it? Hello Weird? Hello Wednesdays? Whatever this is entitled on Spotify, it's that one. I'm your host Dave and I am joined by the always lovely Luke Ferry. How's it going handsome? Oh very good. Yeah you're looking good. Especially with that opening. Oh dude that is like my... You want to see me bop around like a dumbass place, spooky upbeat music. That's a fun one right?
Oh man. It's like now I want to watch Halloween Town. Oh so good. But yeah so this is our little cryptic cocktail party bonus episodes that we're going to be doing every week. Just for the month of October just to get a little spooky with it. Just a little something extra for you guys. Because I know you guys love the weird and the unusual and the... I don't know. What does that girl say in fucking Beetlejuice? Strange and unusual? That's what it is.
I too am strange and then every fucking goth hot topic girl forever use that and got shitty tattoos at 18. Yeah but we all got shitty tattoos at 18. You do. The silence was deafening. God damn. Oh shit. Alright well today the script is going to be flipped literally. Luke is going to be the one taking the reins on this one. Why am I taking the reins on this one Dave? Because I realized that the subject matter that I chose for mine I couldn't condense into a cohesive story.
Because I chose something that is actual history and there's more to it than I thought there was. That is to say I chose poorly. Let's just put it that way. The life of a tortured human being really can't just be like rushed in in like seven minutes. I mean... fair. Alright Luke well I know this is your first time. You're pretty green at this. The reading of the script but I think you're going to do just fine. I'm excited to hear your story. Oh these tender feet are ready to run dude.
Why don't we set the mood? You got a lighter on you? No. Here I got one. There we go. There it goes. A little campfire sound for you bud. That's a campfire. You don't have to say sound. It's a campfire. Oh yeah. We're actually around a fire. In the dark woods with eyes behind us in the trees. Oh you're really setting the mood. I'm spooked now. I am. I'm shirtless. I don't know why I took it off. It's kind of chilly but you're looking. Yeah but this is a...
So alright Luke. So what do you got for us today? Alright so we've talked about Bigfoots before. He's the guy on the logo drinking the brewski. True. We never discussed Bigfoots besides the fact that I don't buy into them. Oh see I actually kind of do. For another episode. So we know what he drinks which is beer because it's on the logo. But what does he eat? Oh shit.
You know what this is actually... alright so this is one of the main things why I don't believe in Bigfoot because there's no... There's no environment where he could sustain a... I'm thinking too much of it. I'm just gonna have fun with this. I'm gonna say fish and berries like a bear. You are very close. Am I? Yes. Is he vegetarian? No. Just fish? Octopus. Bear. Does he eat bears? Alright well... Your face made it seem like I just did something. It's actually a dish called by some... Sanakji.
Sanakji? But most of us know it as... Octopus. No way! And not just any boring ass sea octopus. The Pacific Northwest tree octopus. What the fuck is the tree octopus? So due to the moistness of the temperate rainforest of the Olympic Peninsula... I feel like you're gonna die. The octopus Paxerbolis spends its early adult life in the ocean where it grows to be on average about a foot from its arm tip to its mantle tip.
When the time comes to venture forward this amphibious friend will migrate out of the Pacific Ocean and start its new life in the temperate forest. Okay. Alright. I'm vibing with this. So it's kind of like a coconut crab kind of thing. I can see that. But an octopus. But an octopus. But an octopus. First of all that's fucking... Alright. We've talked about a lot of spooky shit on the show. A tree octopus is hands down the most terrifying thing I've ever heard in my entire life.
Or they're best friends. Who knows? No, no, no, no, no. Because first of all they're too smart. I'm gonna assume already. They're very smart. They are strong as all fuck, dude. Like imagine like... You know how like Australians joke about like drop bears but they're just talking about koalas basically? Now imagine that. But a fucking octopus just drops on your head and just fucking chokes you out like a motherfucking... No. Full nightmare feel. All sad, dude. But anyways, I'm sorry. Continue.
Well thanks to the moistness and a skin adaptation... The ocephalopods will not dry out and can live, laugh, and even love, Dave, in the lush, coniferous forests of the Pacific Northwest. So they're like in like the Redwood forests? Uh, no. That is more southern. That's around San Francisco. Yeah, that's like California. Okay. So they're like... We're talking around the Puget Sound. We're talking about Twilight area. Yeah, like right near Canada.
Gotcha. Alright. Like about a hundred miles from like Seattle. Yeah, it's America's answer to England. Got it. Yeah. Sorry. But my man, you ready for the sad part? No. Why is there a sad part? I know. Me neither. They're endangered. Well, I would assume so. And it's our fault. Road construction is cutting off the water access they need for the spawning season. Suburban encroachment and logging are destroying their habitat.
And predators such as eagles, Sasquatch, and humankind too are lessening their numbers at a drastically. And I don't give a shit, Dave. I don't give a fucking shit if you're in your home. Pour one out for dead homies, David, because we already lost the Douglas octopus and the Red-Ringed Madrona sucker. Are those real octopus? No. The last two sounded real. Did you make those up or were those, was that actually in your research? This is in my research. Oh, was it? That's so good.
I would have believed that in a fucking heartbeat, dude. Alright. Can I just say that the list of... Yeah, so where are you at? Where are you at? First of all, I love that the list of it's like the apex predators that are killing this thing goes eagle, bigfoot, and then humans. Like, because two out of the three are way more abundant, I'm going to assume, than one of those. And that is the eagle. Eagles are quite right.
Oh shit, no. Oh God. Alright, so here's what I'm gathering so far. So what's it called again? The tree, the Pacific Northwest tree octopus. Alright, so there are many different species. So it lives in the water until about a foot long. Yeah, about its first year or two. Okay, so then it migrates onto land, and then it lives in the canopy of the Pacific Northwest forests. So more so it hunts in the canopy. So it doesn't live in the trees, it just hunts in the trees? It nests in small puddles.
Oh, okay. And then so logging and deforestation is causing the routes that it would have to take back to the ocean to spawn like a salmon. But it can't do that, and it gets all discombobulated and can't figure its way back home because now the landscape has changed. And it's causing it to die off. Well, yeah, if it encounters a highway. In the water, they're pretty quick. As most octopus are. Yeah, on a highway, it's flat now. Oh, sad. I know. I don't like that.
You know, it's sad that, you know, Bigfoot eat them, but that's just nature. Okay, he's not doing anything inherently wrong. And as we know, nature is metal, nature is brutal. I do follow an Instagram account called Nature is Metal. Nature is Metal, which is fantastic. It makes me so sad, but I love it. But we, the peoples, we are in the wrong. Not only are we not. We're not eating them like Sasquatches and fucking eagles.
Not only are we not addressing the conservation efforts that need to be put in place, but starting in the 1920s, humans started gathering up these octopi for fashion and decorative purposes. Really? And there is a. Is it like a big black market for this? Or is it a black market? No. This is just forgotten history. You're so serious about this. And then the fucking loggers, dude. Okay. I get it. Like you have, you got to get your bag. But loggers hated them.
You see the Pacific Northwest tree octopus favors the lucrative old growth forest and any efforts for conservation is met with hostility from the logging industry. It said that loggers of the time would kill them on site, mostly fueled by anti-octopi propaganda. Do you have any? I need to, I need to know what this propaganda is. I'm sure you don't have any, do you? Oh buddy. Do you have any? Okay. I'm just going to read directly from the source. Is this the propaganda? Yes. Hell yeah.
All right. Hit me. These fears were fueled in no small part by gratuitous stories involving octopuses harassing lumberjacks and distressing damsels in the Northwest theme pulp magazines of suckering flesh and the heroes of men's action movies in the 1950s. These magazine publishers depended on cheap paper made from wood pulp and were glad to contribute to the anti-octopus propaganda campaign of the timber industry.
All right. So hold on. So pulp magazines of the 50s and the logging industry lobbied like Congress to prevent preservation of the forests because they hated these fucking octopus so much. And I got to know what were they doing to distress damsels? Were they like pulling up their skirts? Like what were they doing? Suckers, sucker in the flesh. Jesus Christ. I feel like these are just things that wily raccoons get up to. I know, but they got little masks so it's cute.
True. They do have little tiny human hands and they can hold a cookie. Yeah. No one's mad at the raccoon. Little buddies. But octopus can also open car doors and probably fucking kill you if they wanted to. Yeah, but I don't think they want to. I think they're just cute little buddies. True. Off topic. I watch a lot of like David Attenborough documentaries, like almost consistently. So I watch a lot. And I really am a big fan of like the shallow oceans and also like the deep, deep, deep oceans.
And dude, some of these fucking crazy cuttlefish and like shit like that that they have out there, they're so cute. My wife's watching and she goes, delicious. So she's the problem. She's one of these guys. If she saw a fucking tree octopus, she'd be like, I'm all about this. Allie, you're no longer a fan of the show, a friend of the show at all. I love you, but you're out. Grounds for divorce right there. Seriously.
All right. So where we are now is that the government is actively against these things pretty much. Maybe not directly, but indirectly. Yeah, not so much directly against them, but against conservation because of the logging interests. Gotcha. All right. OK, gotcha. So, David, have you ever seen a Pacific Northwest tree octopus? No, but if there anything like the Pacific octopuses, the huge fuckers, I can only imagine they're terrifying. How big do they get? Not that big.
So they probably don't grow much more than what they grew when they came onto land. Yeah, that's pretty much like they were like once they fully grow, they start heading out. They said they can grow up to six foot in diameter, but that's more so rare. Is that like OK, that's like full spread circle. That's not massive. No, no, that's kind of I mean, that's fine. Like, what do you come on, guys? So as much as I would love to see them, you know why we haven't? Homies got the active camo.
Well, I mean, that makes sense. Tree octopi have been seen changing their colors in efforts to hide from predators and to help communicate with other octopi. Well, that tracks, though, because cuttlefish and octopus do that now. And yeah, and squids. So, I mean, what is it like? Is it like is it like predator camo? Like, do they go invisible or is it like, you know, this was first this was first seen in over 100 years ago. So maybe through evolution, their their camouflage has gotten better.
Well, I think 100 years is a little it's a little short for. Yeah, but they're super smart. They could figure it out. Yeah, probably. That's fair. And that paired with their rapidly decreasing population, that makes for a very hard to find animal. And it makes sense why we have kind of forgotten about their history. True. I got to find me a pair of shoes made out of them, though. Oh, wow. You're on Ali's side real fast.
No, it's not that. But I mean, like, I mean, if they're going to be extinct, I want to I want to have something of them. Are you going for a white rhino, too? Yeah. I mean, I mean, I already got a couple of fucking ivory. Don't worry about it. I'm not. Don't worry about it. You know, do I have a white rhino carved out of ivory from a white rhino horn? Maybe. But that's called it's called remembrance, Luke. All right. It's called it's it's called celebrating a life. OK, don't judge me.
As fucked up as that is. So there are different species all over the world, not just the Pacific Northwest, including the UK, Rome and Polynesia. But if you're in the U.S. and you'd like to try your luck at getting a glimpse of one of this majestic and highly intelligent creatures, your best bet is the western shores of the Puget Sound and the Hood Canal. And don't just look up into the trees because they, of course, love a good puddle.
And if you're as old as me and Dave, your parents probably too, relieved to this bullshit fucking thing that came up when the Internet was new. This is a hoax created by Niles Apato in 1998. So all right. So that's pretty good. But that also reminds me of, first of all, I want I want I you know what? Fuck it. I'm going to I want I choose to believe these are real because I love them.
So I I know it's ignorant of me to just say I believe something that is clearly a hoax like anyone who believes in Q or anything like. Yeah, I walked by two churches on my way home from work, so I think I can believe in a fucking octopus. Like it's it's fine. It's fine. But if they were so fucking smart, why can't they outsmart these loggers? They're slow, but also and they don't have axes and chainsaws. They could just go back to living in the water.
Have you seen how beautiful it is in the Pacific? Do they develop lungs or something like that? They have to know because they go to the puddles and it's moist there. Stop saying that. You're bumming me out super hard. The the one thing that I it reminds me of, do you remember those old commercials where they talked about this?
This is kind of the same vein of like your parents believing something that came out of the hoax on the Internet is like I think in the early 2000s, there was a commercial about house hippos and they were like the size of mice or like rats basically. I vaguely remember that. Dude, I remember at the end, dude. So that basically is wild. That that commercial was about media literacy and knowing what to believe and what not to believe when you see it on the Internet and or the TV.
But even though it had that message at the end, I was still like 10. So I didn't understand it. So like, fuck you. I just found out Santa's not real. So I still believed. So for a hot minute there, I was like, yo, these house hippos are going to eat all my chips. Better lock this shit away. The house hippos, a fictitious species of hippopotamus, the subject of a Canadian television public service announcement produced concerned children's advertisers.
That's a company produced by concerned children's advertisers in May of 1999 and reintroduced in 2019. The fictitious animal found throughout Canada and the eastern United States. The animal is described for sleeping 16 hours a day and enjoying I wish I found this and did a whole fucking thing, enjoying a diet of raisins, chips and crumbs from a peanut butter on toast. Yeah, that's his favorite meal was peanut butter, just crumbs from peanut butter on toast.
Yeah, the commercial was for media literacy, like making sure that you don't believe. That's hilarious. Stupid shit. And it was aimed at children, but children don't know what media literacy is. No, you're going to see a fucking tiny house. It will be like, yeah, that's that's real. I think we've got house that was in here. That's kind of what the the tree, the tree octopus is. Is it not? No, 100 percent.
So if anyone would like to go check out my source, it is just Google Pacific Northwest tree octopus. And it's Zapotope dot net slash tree octopus. They have been updating this website since 98. Oh, so they keep adding new information to it. Let's see. The most recent one was two months ago. That's fucking wild, dude. And that was the rare deep sea octopus nursery discovered off Costa Rica and cuttlefish camouflages complex more so than previously thought.
Yeah, that's so I think most of it is just octopus news. And then every once in a while there's like and then sometimes they're in trees. So it's a legit octopus site. And then they just every once in a while add new facts about the tree octopus. That's so fucking good, dude. Holy shit. All right, man. Well, thank you so much for sharing, Luke. That was really good. I had a lot of fun with that. That was fun. These these weekly episodes are going to be out of control.
My next one is going to be significantly less fun. That's fine. Mine's going to be a complete bummer and it's probably going to be an hour long because you know, you know the history of goody coal. It's oh, yeah. Yeah. Maybe I'll change it to something a little less depressing. Anyway, anyway, you know that weird cryptid I sent you the other day. Yeah, that's what I'm doing. That's I mean, that's not really a cryptid. Anyways, thank you so much for listening, everyone.
I hope you enjoy the this this Hello Wednesday episode. It was it was it was an emotional roller coaster, to say the least. Made me moist. Fuck. All right. I'm going to end the episode now. Luke, would you like to say goodbye? No. Moist. Let me just extinguish this fire real quick. There we go. Practice fire safety. There we go. Pssst. Pssst.