Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus

Basic Information

The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus is a fictional creature which was invented as an internet hoax in 1998. As the name says, it is allegedly a tree-dwelling octopus which lives in the Olympic National Forest in the state of Washington, USA, and it is preyed upon by the sasquatch.

Sources

Bibliography

1. Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus! - original hoax site

2. Wikipedia entry

The TV miniseries The Future Is Wild shows a hypothetical tree-dwelling octopus that might evolve 200 million years into the future. Website

Game and Story Use

• Even if it's not real, the idea of a tree-dwelling octopus is too cool to ignore. Octopi can be creepy at the best of time - they are molluscs, have lots of tentacles with suckers and hooks on them, are fairly smart, and can change color. Now imagine some Giant Octopus camouflaging itself in the trees, and grabbing a hapless adventurer from above and dragging him into the tree tops to devour him…
• Consider making them more numerous and more aggressive. Then make them swarm like the squids menacing Californian coastlines, and you have a nice environmental hazard - and possibly the seed for a B-Movie plot!
• Not to be confused with the octopus tree, which is either a multi-trunked spruce from Oregon, a weird, spiky plant from Madagascar or a sea-anemone like monster from "that RPG".