Watch a seal whip an octopus into a kayaker’s face

This is normally where I would try to come up with a clever introduction to get you interested in the story, but I am not going to bother with that today because this is a story about a seal coming out of the water and THROWING AN OCTOPUS AT A PERSON’S FACE.

Yes, that is the greatest combination of words ever to appear on the internet. The tale starts off in New Zealand, because if it’s a weird story involving animals in the water, it is almost always happening near Australia. A group of GoPro employees were kayaking to test out the company’s new Hero7 camera when a feisty seal popped out of the water and whipped a cephalopod at Kyle Mulinder’s noggin.

Luckily Mulinder’s friend Taiyo Masuda posted the video to Instagram so we could all watch it transpire:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BoD3bluhKmS/?utm_source=ig_embed

“He thrashed it in mid-fight and my face happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Mulinder told Yahoo News. “I was, like, ‘mate, what just happened?’ It was weird because it happened so fast, but I could feel all the hard parts of the octopus on my face like ‘dum dum dum.”

And no, the seal was not just being a jerk to Mulinder — it was actually fighting to make the octopus his lunch. According to LiveScience, some marine mammals use this method to tenderize the notriously crafty octopuses for eating.

But despite the aggressive thwacking, the seal lost out on his lunch that day, because the octopus ended up clinging to the bottom of Mulinder’s kayak. So despite the intensity of the video for all involved, it seems everyone kayaked — and swam — away unharmed.

[h/t Insider]