The little blue octopus was spotted in 2015 by researchers aboard the submersible Nautilus in 5,800-ft. deep waters. The sub’s remotely operated camera was visually combing the ocean floor when it caught sight of a flash of blue and zoomed in to spot a little eight-armed creature all alone in the water.
“It’s blue!” said another.
“Is that a cute little guy or what?”
There it stayed, unexamined until 2017, when researchers in the lab were going through photos of the station’s specimens, recognized the octopus as something different, and reached out to octopus expert Janet Voight, curator emerita of invertebrates at the Field Museum in Chicago, and the lead author of the Zootaxa paper.
Special enough that Voight requested the research station ship her the specimen so she could get a look at its innards—not with a scalpel and a microscope, but with a CT scanner, a system that the Field Museum had only recently set up. From the photo alone, the octopus appeared to belong to the genus Thaumelodone, a variety of small, squat octopus found in the deep waters of the southern hemisphere. That was just a guess, however, and Voight was anxious to see the specimen up close so she could make sure.
It took five years for the research station to agree to send the sample to Chicago and it wasn’t until 2022 that Voight at last got it on the CT scan table. At first, there was evidence that the animal was indeed part of the Thaumelodone genus. It had a zigzag pattern of suckers on its arms, which is a distinctly Thaumelodone feature. It also had no ink sac—consistent with a Thaumelodone, since in the darkness of the deep ocean, predators can’t see their prey anyway, so a defensive cloud of ink serves no protective function.
Then there was the texture. Thaumelodone octopuses are covered with small bumps, or papillae, but the little blue octopus was smooth. There was, too, the matter of the animal’s teeth—or tooth. Thaumelodone typically have seven teeth, but the specimen had just one large one. Finally came the color. The typical Thaumelodone is a shade of maroon. This one—while appearing blue under the light of an underwater camera—was actually white or even clear on top and purple on the bottom.
So: does this matter—the business of what genus a dead, pickled critter belongs to? Maybe not.
But it’s a window—a glimpse into inky ocean depths that usually go unseen; a glimpse into a seemingly solitary animal that somehow ekes out a living there; a glimpse—and a reminder—Voight says, that there is biodiversity everywhere and it has to be protected.
“It’s the first deep-sea octopus from the Equatorial Pacific in the east,” Voight says. “It represents everything in the deep sea that we don’t even know exists. We talk about deep-sea mining but we don’t know what is there and we’re putting it all at risk. There are,” she adds, “extraordinary things” there.
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