Yes, the sharktopus is a ridiculous fantasy creature from the movies, but strange things can happen between two very different species in real life, too. Do you recall the picture of a weasel riding on the back of a flying woodpecker? That was ten years ago, before we blamed everything on artificial intelligence. Well, now we have a video of an octopus riding on the back of a shark!
This footage was captured in 2023 in the Hauraki Gulf near Kawau Island, New Zealand. The scientists from the University of Auckland saw something unusual on a mako shark and launched a GoPro in the water and a drone overhead to investigate. They tracked the two animals for ten minutes. The sighting was quite a surprise, as octopuses rarely come close to the water's surface. And that's about as close to a sharktopus as we're going to get in real life. -via Damn Interesting