Octopus ink contains micro parasites that act as acid

I'm building a story around a newly discovered kind of deep-ocean octopuses whose ink contain "parasites" which act as acid in organisms.

These ink parasites can be used as a weapon of mass destruction. This is what the director of an underwater lab plans to do, together with the Military of course. The protagonist, a young woman, a teuthologist, who came to work on these octopuses and their ink at the lab, wants to stop that.

Blood of the octopuses acts as an antidote to this ink. It destroys the parasites and reverses the damage done by them. A small dose of octopus blood against a large dose of ink won't help. So there should be either a balance or there should be more blood.

But these parasites don't live long outside of organisms and their ink ecosystem, they die.

These parasites can eat through skin and other soft materials like cloth and paper.

Now I have come to a few problems I cannot solve that are key to my plot.

1. How do these parasites live withing the body of the octopus, its sacs, and not destroy it?
2. What could be so crucial in the ink for these parasites to be able to survive only in it and living organisms?
3. For my plot to work, the parasites should be able to do damage to cables, metal, plastic and so on, when they die. The protagonist will use that when she needs to destroy the lab. She will break an ampoule containing these parasites upon the generators of the lab. What can cause the parasites to maybe blow up or maybe turn into a natural acid upon death?

If anyone has any good ideas, please advise.

I'm interested in theories that would be science-based according to today's world. I mean nothing too much new. Octopuses exist, their ink is a ways of escaping from prey, except that ink of these octopuses is meant to kill rather than help escape. In water, outside of organisms, the parasites will die. So there's not much chance of them spreading. These octopuses live very deep beyond where we can go now.

posted almost 6 years ago

SovereignSun‭

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