It’s tiny. It’s blue. And it has scientists awe-struck. A golf ball-size octopus found on the deep seafloor off the Galápagos Islands is an entirely new species, scientists just announced.
In July of 2015, during a 10-day expedition in the Pacific Ocean, researchers aboard the E/V Nautilus launched a robotic sub called Hercules just off the coast of Darwin Island, part of the Galápagos archipelago. On an underwater mountainside some 1,773 meters below the sea’s surface, they discovered a little blue octopus. On a video of the excursion, the scientists can be heard chuckling and cooing over the creature: “Is that a cute little guy or what,” says one team member, followed by another, “Oh my goodness, that is adorable.”
After collecting some specimens to analyze back at their lab at the Charles Darwin Research Station, the scientists realized they couldn’t identify the blue cephalopod. They sent an image to octopus expert Janet Voight, curator emerita of invertebrates at the Field Museum in Chicago. “Right away, I knew it was something really special,” said Voight, lead author on a new paper describing the find published in Zootaxa, in a statement. “I’d never seen anything like it.”
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The team looked at the octopus’s internal organs using micro-CT scanning, which collects thousands of x-ray image slices through an object that can then be put together to create a super high-resolution virtual model. Details such as the relatively few suckers on its arms, its smooth skin, beak features and the coloring around its organs and parts of the mantle indicated a new species, now called Microeledone galapagensis. Turns out, this “cute little guy” also had 13 eggs in its ovaries.
“Discoveries like these remind us how much of the deep ocean in Galápagos remains unexplored,” said co-author Salome Buglass, of the University of California of Los Angeles, formerly at the CDF, in the same statement.
The Galápagos Islands, sitting off the coast of Ecuador, are famous for the unique animals and plants that live there. They are also home to Darwin’s finches, which Charles Darwin discovered during his famous 1830s survey of the area aboard the HMS Beagle.
