Nickie Muir: Many legs to marine research

Nickie Muir.

Kupe chased one, from Hawaiki to here. What had been a bad omen became the harbinger of opportunity and a new land.

In whakatauki, or Maori proverbs they are a metaphor for either giving up too easily or intractable resilience.

My Dad, having grown up in Kiribati with a youth spent diving with the locals, has a particularly fetching habit of finding them on reefs when out fishing , turning them inside out and biting them between the eyes.

It took me a trip to the outer Fiji island of Rabi and seeing all the young men doing exactly the same thing that made me realise where he'd learnt it.

There were stories in Arthur Grimble's A Pattern of Islands where he said boys would use themselves as human bait to lure them out of holes in the reef before killing them.

Dad said he'd never seen it but he had seen ones as big as six-feet long on the outer reef.

The German ones appear to be particularly intelligent. One could predict football matches and another, annoyed at a bright light shining in his aquarium every night worked out he could short circuit the lamp by squirting water at it.

A kiwi one in Kelly Tarlton's takes tourists photos as a $2 fundraiser for a sea charity.

They're pretty interesting things these wheke or octopus.

This time last year my daughter and a couple of her friends found a particularly cheeky one in a rock pool.

A small octopus - the girls hand-fed "Frederika" for months until she probably became someone's fish bait - he/she was particularly unconcerned about such things as personal safety.

A friend, who's also a marine biologist said she'd never seen an octopus interact with humans in the way that this one did - initially she thought that sitting on an open rock or on a human's shoes and putting one tentacle in the air may have been some sort of aggressive egg-protecting defence.

The more often the tentacle came up and got rewarded with bashed-off rock oysters the more it seemed, however, that here was an octopus who knew when it was on to a good thing.

By the time she'd stolen a pink reef shoe and stashed it in her rock cave we knew that we had some serious octopus personality sitting in a pool at the local beach.

This month, NIWA's research vessel, the Tangaroa, is spending a month in the subantarctic region researching the yellow octopus which the endangered New Zealand sea lion feeds on.

There's so much we don't know about the sea and just how rich and varied marine life is.

Perhaps the next generation of antibiotic or protein-packed kelp and a whole new industry is lying at our door.

What we need is not more bridges but a tertiary education provider, based up here that is marine focussed and attracts students from all over the Pacific.

Now that's a wheke worth chasing.