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A video taken by Taiyo Masuda shows a New Zealand fur seal hitting a kayaker with an octopus on September 22 near Kaikoura, New Zealand.(Photo: Screenshot of a video taken on a GoPro HERO7 by the Instagram user @taiyomasuda showing the Instagram user @barekiwi hit with the octopus)
A filmmaker testing a recently launched camera during a kayak trip captured an incredible sight: a seal that hits an adventurer comrade with a live octopus.
Taiyo Masuda, 23, says he was on a kayak trip off New Zealand on September 22, funded by the GoPro, when he shot the now viral video.
It's happened in an instant: A seal sits near a kayaker, the octopus in tow. The seal whips the head by striking the boater with the mollusc. The man is left stunned.
An explanation, according to Rochelle Constantine, associate professor at the Faculty of Biological Sciences at the University of Auckland.
This is not nice.
The seal did not intentionally attempt to slap Mulinder from Constantine's point of view. The man was probably right in the way.
Instead, the seal was probably trying to tear the octopus tentacle with the force of the throw, she said in an email.
"I've seen seals do it before, it's not an unusual sight but normally there's no one on the way," she wrote. "Often, we see (seals) swallowing the tentacle on the surface like a big sprig of spaghetti."
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Seals often repeat the action several times, pulling one tentacle at a time. So Constantine believes that seals eat the rest of the body.
"It's a good meal, especially when they have a big octopus, as this video shows," she wrote.
Aside from the morbid explanation, the video provoked a lot of laughs, starting with Masuda and Mulinder.
"We immediately started laughing so much (hard), we talked about it all week," Masuda wrote to USA TODAY's HUI in an email.
He says the trip was part of a launch event for the GoPro HERO7 camera. GoPro shared the video on social media where it has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.
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