Lauren Smith

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28 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2025 last heard 4 Dec

Lauren Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.

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The kind of habitat where you'd normally find it is several days distance away, even by boat, from our coastline.

So in terms of how it really got here and how it washed up, it's a bit of a mystery.

So I first heard on Sunday evening, there were photographs of the arms of what turned out to be this octopus washed up on my local beach.

It was a little hard to say, actually, because the arms were sort of, although they were large, they were clearly broken off in places.

So it could have been one massive arm that was broken up or it could have been at least two or three arms that were just in different sections.

So I got in touch with some specialists in the field and they were able to identify it for me just from the photographs, actually.

Very rare deep water species that is hardly ever seen.

The common name for it is seven-armed octopus.

However, I hate to disappoint, but it does actually have eight arms.

Where that name comes from is the male has got a modified appendage of one of the arms and he curls that underneath his body.

It's an appendage used for mating, so he likes to keep it nice and safe.

So it appears that there's only seven arms.

No, it's a special shaped arm that he uses with mating with the females.

They live in really deep water.

The large animals of this size, you're talking about four metres, once they're kind of adults at that size...

they're usually in really deep water.

So we're talking 500 metres plus depth water.

And in and around our North Sea, actually, there's only kind of one place and it's known as the Norwegian Trench.

And it's all right up the way, hugging the coast of Norway, where in parts it gets down to around 700 metres.

But generally, we don't have that depth water in our coastal waters.

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