Beneath the waves of the world’s oceans, a men­ace is stir­ring. A threat is ris­ing from the muck and mire of the seafloor bot­tom, and human­ity is unaware of the cephalo­pod inva­sion. We will stare in hor­ror as their slimly ten­drils and flex­i­ble bod­ies creep towards us. And our defenses will frag­ment and be destroyed before their bone­less onslaught. The Onion rightly paints a future dooms­day sce­nario where dol­phins grow oppos­able thumbs and soon take over the world. How­ever humor­ous this sit­u­a­tion may sound, we are sadly direct­ing our atten­tion to the wrong crea­tures. Dol­phins can never enslave the human race for their fish mines, but Octo­pus can. These mussel-adoring blue-blooded ani­mals will have no qualms mak­ing us mine for their favorite hard-shelled snacks. Let us delve into the genius of our future overlords.

Future Over­lord of the Pacific Mus­sel Mine.

Where to even start with these mon­sters of the sea, and soon to be land ban­shees as well? For starters, each one is poi­so­nous. Ah! You may say, but only the Blue-Ringed Octo­pus is actu­ally deadly to humans! And since we can see blue rings quite clearly, it should be easy to avoid death-by-octopus, right? Wrong. An aver­age octo­pus lives 4 years, which means that they can have 10 gen­er­a­tions every time us humans only have one. This only encour­ages genetic muta­tions, and we all know what that means: in less than 50 years octo­pus will be able to spit instant-death poi­son. It’s like the Dilophosaurus from Juras­sic Park, except these guys are small and squishy.

Squirt­ing Legion of Doom

Astute read­ers may also point out that octo­pus and other cephalopods only live in water, and even if they could evolve the abil­ity to walk on land like our ances­tors did, it would be a mat­ter of mil­lions of years: which would pro­vide us with plenty of time to pre­pare ade­quate defenses. Too late. Squids of death already can crawl on land between tidal pools, and aquar­i­ums report that octo­pus can break out of their highly secured cages, crawl down the hall,  snack on the tasty morsels in the shell­fish stor­age tanks, and then return to their own tanks. All they leave behind is a wet and slimy trail of what I can only expect is highly toxic poi­son. And they do this at night, when they know we’re not look­ing.

Jesus Christ on a crutch.

And that’s not even the worst part. Cephalopods are mas­ters of dis­guise. Not only are they col­or­morphs who can change their col­oration on com­mand from their insid­i­ous brains, but they also have evolved the abil­ity to actu­ally mimic the behav­ior and appear­ance of other crea­tures. Mimic octo­pus can change into crabs, fish, and other crea­tures.  Watch out for that weird “Uncle Jerry” across the street: is he a human, or an octo­pus in dis­guise? And just when you’re about to call the police on him, *BAM* a face full of ink before you’re hit with the spit­ting poison.

Uncle Jerry.

Just when things couldn’t get worse for land-dwellers, it does. These cephalopods are the trans­form­ers of the ocean. They can creep around on all 8 ten­ta­cles, they can jet along with their inter­nal squirters, and they can even “walk” on two ten­ta­cles. They’re silent too: squid can change col­ors of dif­fer­ent appendages and hold silent light-assisted con­ver­sa­tions with mul­ti­ple squid at once. Sneak attacks are easy when you can creep along and com­mu­ni­cate silently.

RED RED GREEN RED: I will dis­tract the humans while you squirt them with your radioac­tive ink.

Think we can just blow them away? Think again. They don’t have any skele­tons, so you can’t just shoot them in a crit­i­cal area to dis­able their move­ment. Any shot will just go right through them with min­i­mal dam­age. With 8 ten­ta­cles, you’ll need to hit them mul­ti­ple times before they even start to feel it. Even their head­shots aren’t that deadly: their ner­vous sys­tem is dis­trib­uted through­out the body, and the ten­ta­cles are often capa­ble of run­ning the show when the head is too busy being blown off. And, of course, octo­pus already have the abil­ity to use coconut shells as shields. They can hold the shell with 6 ten­ta­cles, and walk with the other two.

WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW

Their end goal, of course, is to enslave humans to be their mus­sel field farm­ers. They exhibit a clear cruel streak. Already known to  “jug­gle [their] fel­low tank­mates around out of bore­dom, as well as throw­ing rocks and smash­ing the aquar­ium glass,” it’s no stretch of the imag­i­na­tion to see them as toss­ing humans around when­ever their mus­sel pro­duc­tion isn’t up to par. Right before they rip them apart with their ten­ta­cles, that is. With 8 arms, they can get in 200–400% more whip­pings than the tra­di­tional South­ern Amer­i­can slaver. Even their poi­sons are a cruel joke: “Tetrodotoxin poi­son­ing can result in the vic­tim being fully aware of his sur­round­ings but unable to breathe. Because of the paral­y­sis that occurs they have no way of sig­nal­ing for help or any way of indi­cat­ing dis­tress.” And believe me, when Chester drops wide-eyed on the farm floor, you’ll damn well be sure to dou­ble your mus­sel production.

OH HAI. NOTHING TO SEE HERE.

Finally, we must address the most potent threat of all: cut­tle­fish. Never. EVER. Cud­dle with a cut­tle­fish. If you do, human­ity will for­ever be doomed. Cud­dling with a cut­tle­fish is like cud­dling with the next Hitler. Just con­sider that, smart guy.

Don’t trust this guy at all.

So what do we do about this? Global warm­ing, and a lot of it. While the sea level will rise, we can also make the sur­face so dry and humid they’ll instantly shrivel up and die. And that’s how we roll.