FIELD FILE · TREE-OCTOPUSOTHERHOAX / DEBUNKED
Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus
Also known as Octopus paxarbolis, Tree octopus
A tree-climbing octopus said to live in the Olympic Peninsula rainforest – a famous 1998 internet hoax used to teach students to check sources.
The Pacific Northwest tree octopus is one of the internet’s oldest and best-loved hoaxes. In 1998 a Washington-based humor writer using the pseudonym Lyle Zapato published a deadpan conservation website about an endangered octopus that supposedly lives not in the sea but in the trees of the Olympic Peninsula’s temperate rainforest, on the eastern side of the Olympic Mountains near Hood Canal.
The site, styled like a sincere advocacy page, gave the animal a scientific name, Octopus paxarbolis – from the Latin root of “Pacific” and the Spanish árbol, tree – and a wealth of invented natural history. The tree octopus was said to grow to about a foot long, swing through branches on its arms, hunt insects, frogs and rodents, raid bird nests for eggs, signal its moods by changing color, and return to Hood Canal each spring to spawn. Its enemies included logging, suburban sprawl, house cats, bald eagles and, tellingly, the Sasquatch.
The joke took on a serious second life in classrooms. In 2006 researchers at the University of Connecticut led by literacy professor Donald Leu used the site to test middle-school students’ ability to judge online information, and reported that all 25 students in one group believed it – some insisting the animal was real even after being told otherwise. Later studies in the United States and the Netherlands repeated the experiment with similar results, and the site became a staple of internet-literacy lessons.
Real octopuses breathe with gills and can survive out of water only briefly, so there is no tree octopus in Washington’s forests. But the hoax has become a genuine piece of Pacific Northwest folklore, and in 2018 the Library of Congress included the website in the first batch of its Web Cultures archive.
- Type
- Other
- Status
- Hoax / debunked
- First reported
- 1998
- Best-known location
- Olympic Peninsula rainforests near Hood Canal, Washington
- Also called
- Octopus paxarbolis, Tree octopus
- Reported in
- Washington
What witnesses describe
A small octopus, roughly a foot long, with mottled brown skin that turns red when angry and white when afraid, said to have large eyes and to cling to branches with its suckered arms.
Where and when it’s seen
Supposedly the mossy temperate rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula near Hood Canal, Washington, returning to the water only to spawn – in reality, only on the internet.
Notable sightings
- 1998The website appears Washington State
Lyle Zapato published his “Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus” page, complete with a scientific name, a faked photo and calls to protect the species.
- 2006The UConn internet-literacy study University of Connecticut
Researchers reported that all 25 middle-school students in one test group were fooled by the site, prompting national news coverage about online literacy.
- 2018Enters the Library of Congress Washington, D.C.
The tree octopus site was among 30 websites in the initial collection of the Library of Congress’s Web Cultures archive, preserved as a landmark of online humor.
What could explain it?
- The tree octopus is an admitted satire created in 1998; its author never claimed it was real.
- Octopuses are marine animals that breathe through gills and cannot live in trees or survive long out of water.
- The site’s jokes – a Sasquatch predator, a fictional “Kelvinic University” and a hat-making industry – are clues planted to test readers’ critical thinking.
Legend, culture and tourism
The tree octopus is a classroom classic, used by teachers and librarians worldwide to teach source evaluation, and a favorite Pacific Northwest in-joke alongside the region’s Bigfoot lore. It has inspired stuffed toys, T-shirts and spin-off hoaxes, and is often grouped with the drop bear and the spaghetti-tree hoax.
Places to visit
Where it’s reported
Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus in the news
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Sources
First published · Updated
