Guernsey octopus boom ‘is decimating our shellfish catch’

He said the first six months of 2024 “yielded a very successful catch” but from July to the end of the year the fishing “just died”.

“My earnings have completely gone in the last seven months,” he said.

Mr Fallaize said the molluscs had been raiding his pots and he had pulled up more than 700 of the creatures in the last seven months.

He said while that left him with plenty of octopus to sell, there was very little demand for it locally and he was “cutting them up for bait” instead.

Octopuses had not been commonly seen around Guernsey for 50 years until 2020, but were famously described by French author Victor Hugo in his 1866 novel Toilers of the Sea.

Written in Guernsey – while the writer was politically exiled from France – the book features a fight between a fisherman and a giant octopus that drank the blood of its “victims”.

“He draws you to him, and into himself,” he wrote. “While bound down, glued to the ground, you feel yourself gradually emptied into this horrible pouch, which is the monster itself,” wrote Hugo in one infamous scene.