No marine worms were injured, or indeed involved in any way

Idea for a movie script: A remake of The Medusa Touch. An octopus, though confined to a tank in an Oberhausen aquarium, is found to be controlling the performance of the German soccer team in the World Cup using telekinesis. Concerned about the potential for panic if the public were to hear about its psychocephalopodic powers, the authorities step in and promulgate a cover story that the octopus is merely predicting the team's successes and failure. I envisage Derek Jacobi in the role of the aquarium owner.

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Inspired by the publicity attracted by Paul the psychic octopus, New Zealand bar owners are following the usual NZ gold-rush mentality ("We'll all get rich by looking for $100 notes on the footpath, because someone else found a $100 note on the footpath last week") in the hope of windfall profits during next year's rugby tournament. The search is on for predictive molluscs to bring patrons into this bar or that.

The obvious candidate is one of the rare giant flax snails Powelliphanta augusta. These ferocious little carnivores live for up to 20 years, which should be long enough to accumulate a broad base of knowledge about each competing country's rugby team. But bad luck for bar owners (though good luck for tourists here; there is little danger of being set upon in the course of a back-country tramp and rasped painfully to death), almost all of the P. augusta population are currently estivating in refrigerators at the Department of Conservation. To enshorterise the story: The mountain ridge that provided their habitat has been removed, for it turned out to have coal underneath it.

Before the open-cast mining began, Solid Energy Corporation promised a cunning anti-extinction policy of retrieving snails by hand (job creation! Yay!) and translocating them to bush elsewhere of equivalent ecological value; but since such land is too expensive hard to find they will be kept on ice until coal extraction is complete and the land is restored to its original conditions, or they all slip quietly over to the Happy Rasping Ground, whichever comes first. Meanwhile we can console ourselves by hating on BP for their lack of environmental concern.

That was all a bit of a downer so here's a picture of an octopus playing charades. It's spelling out the name of a character from a Charles Dickens novel but the fish in the team really don't have a clue.