A Northumberland dog walker came across a bit more than she'd bargained for on her daily walk on the beach.
Steph Taylor-Bradshaw was walking her two dogs with her daughter Hannah on Annstead Beach, between Seahouses and Beadnell, when Hannah told her to put the dogs straight back on their lead. And the reason?
She had spotted an octopus on the beach, "crawling" a couple of metres out of the water. According to Steph, the stranded cephalopod was trying to get back to the water, but the waves kept picking it up and depositing it further up the beach.
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Steph said: "My daughter saw it first and told me to get the dogs on the beach before they saw it. We didn't know if it was a squid or an octopus, but it's quite an unusual site on the beach, isn't it?!
"It was moving a lot, almost crawling along using its tentacles so it wasn't just lying there. But it was getting pushed about because of the rough sea, it was trying to get back in."
Steph and Hannah helped the creature out, picking it up with their dogs' ball-thrower - though it wasn't too pleased. She added: "It grabbed on with its tentacles, it didn't know we were trying to help it, but why would it?"
"We helped it back into deeper water and it swam off, it was cute. We were quite excited because we've never seen one before on the beach and it sort of felt quite special that we'd helped it back into the sea."
Dan Gordon, keeper of biology at Tyne and Wear archives and museums says that the species is most likely a curled octopus, because of the colour and as it seems to have just one row of suckers on each arm. Despite how surprising it may seem to see such a creature on the beach in Northumberland, the curled octopus is quite common around the UK coastline.
Its larger cousin, the common octopus, has two rows of suckers on each arm and are usually found along the south west coast and in the Irish Sea. However, they are said to be becoming more common further north due to the due to climate change influencing the conditions of UK waters.
What's the most unusual thing you've seen on a beach in the North East? Let us know!
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