Excerpt from "Earth Week: Giant group of octopus moms discovered in the deep sea," posted on NSF News on April 17, 2018.
We know more about the surface of the moon than we do about the bottom of the ocean. The seafloor is an alien landscape, with crushing pressures, near-total darkness and fluids wafting from cracks in the Earth's crust.
It's also home to weird animals that scientists are only just getting to know. Now, two deep-sea expeditions have revealed a giant group of octopuses and their eggs in a place where they shouldn't be able to survive.
Where no octopus had gone before?
"When I first saw the photos, I thought, 'They shouldn't be there! Not that deep and not that many of them!'" says Janet Voight, a zoologist at the Field Museum in Chicago and co-author of a paper on the octopuses published this month in the journal Deep Sea Research Part I.
Nearly two miles deep in the Pacific Ocean and 100 miles off the coast of Costa Rica, scientists on two oceanographic cruises used subsea vehicles to explore the Dorado Outcrop, a rocky patch of seafloor formed of cooled and hardened lava from an underwater volcano.
Geochemists explored the outcrop in a submersible, hoping to collect samples of the warm fluids that emerge from cracks in the rocks. They didn't count on finding dozens of octopuses huddled around those openings.
The octopuses are an unknown species of the genus Muusoctopus -- pink, dinner-plate-sized creatures with enormous eyes. Up to 100 of them occupied every available rock in the area.
That in itself was strange -- Muusoctopus are normally loners. Stranger still was that nearly all the octopuses seemed to be mothers, each guarding a clutch of eggs. And this nursery was situated alongside the warm fluids issuing from the cracks in the outcrop.
Continue to full article
#NewsintheField#NSF