Ask how many people have died of a blue-ringed octopus bite and you will get a number that depends on the decade and the author. Popular accounts sometimes say three confirmed deaths. Scholarly tallies cited in reference works run higher, with estimates from around seven to sixteen and a common middle figure near eleven. Some of the difference is definition: confirmed, suspected, well documented, or repeated from an earlier list without a new source. This journal will not pretend the file has been audited into a single integer.
What the disagreement does not change is the shape of the record. Deaths are known. They are not a weekly event. They are associated with handling, with being bitten in the shallows, and with respiratory failure before help arrived. A toxin potent enough to kill, inside an animal that rarely gets the chance, produces exactly this kind of statistic: frightening in the individual case, modest in the public-health table, and wildly over-narrated in proportion to the number of people who simply did not pick the animal up.
The over-narration cuts both ways. One camp sells the octopus as a lurking killer and inflates every beach walk into a survival story. The other camp, reacting to that, calls the danger a myth because the death count is not huge. Both are wrong. A small number of deaths is what you expect from a serious venom paired with an animal that does not seek people. It is not evidence that the venom is mild.
Read the number, whatever version you meet, as a floor under the caution rather than as a score. The rings are asking for a behavior. The behavior is free. The rare obituaries belong to the moments when the request was ignored.