There’s a new octopus on the ocean floor off Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands that’s small and blue (and cute) but with a long name – Microeledon galapensis.
The news is exciting because the octopus is the size of a golf ball and because scientists know very little about octopuses that live in the depths of the tropical Pacific Ocean. As described in the study about octopuses published on Monday In the magazine, Zootaxa.
And it must have been very exciting to the person who knew there was something special about the octopus when he first saw it more than ten years ago – the scientist who led the study that described the new animal.
“Immediately, I knew this was really something special. I had never seen anything like it,” said Janet Voight, lead author of the study.
In 2015, scientists boarded E/V nautilus submarine Sab Kay was studying the ocean floor using a remotely operated camera when he spotted the octopus about 5,800 feet (1768 m) below the water’s surface.
“He’s short!”
“it is blue!”
According to the study, this is how researchers described the octopus when they first saw the animal.
The crew aboard the submersible collected the octopus and noted that they had seen two others that looked like it during their missions in the deep sea.
But when the octopus was brought back to the Charles Darwin Research Station in the Galapagos, researchers weren’t sure what species it was.
He then contacted Janet Voight and made every effort to ensure that she had the sample.
Tiny octopus poses challenges for scientific research
The octopus was small and one of a kind, which meant researchers had to take specific measures to ensure they could study it.
The octopus’s body was preserved in alcohol and formalin and then shipped from the Galapagos Islands to Chicago for Voight to examine the animal at the Field Museum, one of the largest natural history museums in the world.
“When you describe a new species of octopus, you have to see all the parts, including the mouth, the beak, and the teeth. And to see those things, you have to cut the specimen open. We only had one specimen, so I didn’t want to take it apart,” Voight said.
He worked with a team to create micro CT scans of the octopus and create a 3D model of the animal inside and out.
This was the first time in his four-decade career on octopus evolution that he led a study that described a new species of octopus.
She said, “These are small octopuses that live in the deep sea and hardly anyone has seen them on Earth. I consider myself lucky that I got the chance to work with them.”
Why is the discovery of a new tiny octopus so special?
The Galapagos is an archipelago of 20 islands that were made famous by Charles Darwin, a biologist who used his visit to the islands to formulate his theory of evolution in the mid-1800s.
The waters around the islands are home to creatures found nowhere else on Earth and a large portion of it is unknown. Imagine how scientists felt when they saw a tiny octopus they had never seen before.
Edited by: Dmytro Lyubenko