Inky the Octopus

An octopus the size of a rugby ball made an audacious escape through a narrow pipe at New Zealand's National Aquarium, reports said, with the "great escape artist" returning to the ocean. "Inky" the male octopus, given to the Napier aquarium two years ago after being rescued from a crayfish pot, made a dash for freedom by slipping through a small gap in his enclosure, sliding across a wet floor and squeezing through a 150-millimetre-diameter (5.9 inches) pipe, Fairfax New Zealand reported Tuesday. While remarkable, this is not rare. Octopuses have been known for escaping tanks. One of the most popularly traded stories in the aquarium world is mysteriously having fish disappear from a tank on the opposite side of a building from a resident octopus. After this happened a few times, workers put up cameras and found that their octopus would escape the tank, walk across walkways or along pipes, slip into the other tank, help itself to a free meal, then make the trek back, closing both lids of the tanks behind him with humans being none the wiser. Octopuses are crazy intelligent and Inky is just one of many cephalopods that have outsmarted their human caretakers!