Scientists find huge octopuses’ nursery
In Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, Captain Nemo and his crew roam the oceans aboard a submarine called Nautilus and are attacked at one point by an army of giant tentacled creatures.
Almost 150 years after Jules Verne’s classic adventure novel, marine biologists piloting a remotely operated submersible vessel, from a ship called Nautilus, have found the largest gathering of octopuses ever recorded.
The Californian cephalopods, which have challenged established thinking about octopus behaviour, were in no mood for a fight, however. Nearly all of the more than 1000 of them were turned inside out to protect their growing young.
It used to be thought that octopuses were strictly solitary and highly territorial. Then last year researchers in Costa Rica found a deep-sea cluster of dozens of them incubating their eggs on the seabed.
Last week’s much bigger spotting was about 3.2km below the surface of the Pacific off the coast of Monterey. They were huddled on volcanic rock formations at the base of an underwater mountain. Chad King, chief scientist on the Exploration Vessel Nautilus expedition, said: ‘‘We went down the eastern flank of this small hill, and that’s when – boom – we just started seeing pockets of dozens here, dozens there, dozens everywhere.’’
For the past five months the 64-metre Nautilus has been charting previously unseen marine life off Hawaii and down the west coast of North America, from British Columbia in Canada to southern California.
About 99 per cent of the Muusoctopus robustus were inverted, or turned inside out, left, a pose common to brooding females of the species, King told National Geographic.
In some cases the camera picked out tiny cradled by their tentacles.
The scientists also observed a shimmering quality to the water near where the octopuses were concentrated ‘‘kind of like an oasis or a heatwave off the pavement’’, King said.
The team believe that warm water was seeping from the rock and the octopuses were drawn to the higher temperatures to help incubate their eggs.
Janet Voight, a marine biologist at the Field Museum in Chicago, said the breakthrough discovery was ‘‘further proof that we have no idea of what is going on in the deep sea’’. embryos mother’s