THE PLAGUE OF OCTOPUS ON THE SOUTH COAST. 261 



increase in octopus on both shores of the English Channel has not only- 

 been of a phenomenal character, but has caused widespread disaster to 

 the shell fisheries on the French and English coasts alike. Three of 

 these paragraphs are sufficiently detailed to deserve quotation. 



1. From the Western Evening Herald, Plymouth, December 18th, 1899. 



"a devil-fish plague. 



"A correspondent writes as follows from Rivage de Questichou, a small 

 watering-place on the coast of the Cherbourg promontory : ' For the last two 

 or three months this coast has been visited by a perfect octopus plague. They 

 have quite ruined the fisheries, and many men have laid up their boats in 

 despair. They devour everything, even crabs, and lobsters, and oysters, and 

 all shell fish. The other day a man employed at the large oyster-beds near 

 here told me he had that day found one that had eaten eighteen oysters that 

 tide. The shore is strewn with octopus, and the other morning along high- 

 water mark I counted sixty-eight in a distance of two hundred yards. A 

 friend here measured one, and it was 5 feet 7 inches across the tentacles, but 

 there are far larger ones than that. Some of the suckers are as large as a 

 two-shilling piece. They are most loathsome beasts. Unless the cold winter 

 destroys them, there will be no batliing next summer along this coast,' " 



2. From the Western Morning News, Plymouth, September 18th, 1900, 



" Budleigh Salterton crab and lobster fishery has been a very poor one this 

 season. The failure is attributed by the fishermen in a great measure to 

 octopi. The men say that eight or ten years since it was quite an event to 

 take one of these creatures in their crab or lobster pots, but of late, more 

 especially in the past two summers, their number has increased at an alarming 

 rate, and they are now constantly being taken. The presence of the octopi is 

 believed to be due to the excessive heat of recent summers. JS'ot long since 

 an octopus measuring at least 6 feet, with its tentacles fully extended, was 

 captured off the coast, and they have often been seen close in shore, showing 

 a preference for a pebbly or rocky bottom, and seldom seen where there is 

 much sand." 



3. From the Fishing Gazette, London, October 27th, 1900, 



" Last year and this year the coasts of Brittany have been infested by the 

 cuttlefish {Octopus vulgaris), which had been deserted by them for fifteen 

 years previously. In the Department of Finistere they are so abundant that 

 it is almost impossible to turn over a stone on the beach without finding one 

 or more of the pests. In some places they have been thrown up by the sea 

 after a storm in such quantities that their dead bodies threatened to be a 

 danger to the inhabitants, and hundreds of cartloads had to be carted away 

 and sold as manure. 



"In the lobster and crab fishing districts of the coast they have proved so 

 destructive of these fish that the fishermen have been obliged to look to other 

 means of making their living." 



