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THE ANGRY SEA — I was a young child visiting the Oregon coast when I first learned that nature is both powerful and aggressive.
I had found a starfish in the rocks and stopped to admire it. I then crouched down and worked up the courage to touch it. (This likely won't come as much of a surprise to anyone, but I'm not the most comfortable around wild animals — and yes, I do consider a starfish a wild animal.) As I got close, the thing moved, scaring me enough that I lost my balance and ended up in the water.
I didn't have time to get mad at the water-based creature because a seagull swooped down and snatched that starfish out of the water right in front of my wet face. That might have scared me too, but I was too stunned to do anything. That starfish that spooked me was in the clutches of a seagull and I was still all wet! Like I said, nature is powerful and aggressive.
But my run-in with the bird and its prey pales in comparison to what happens in this video.
It was captured in New Zealand in 2018 when a group of kayakers were filming their outing with a GoPro camera. Some seals were feeding around the group when suddenly one of the seals pops out of the water with a tasty treat in its mouth: an octopus.
Instead of surfacing and saying, "What's up?" to the kayakers, the water-loving mammal basically said, "Don't interfere with lunchtime, kayakers. Skat." Why do I assume this is what the seal was thinking? Because he used that octopus in his mouth to slap one of the kayakers right in the face. If that's not a, "get off my turf" message then I don't know what is.
Way to go, nature, you continue to remind us that this is your world and we're just living in it.
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