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Scientists were delighted after discovering a new species of tiny, blue octopus nearly 6,000 feet down off the Galapagos Islands, per a study published in the journal Zootaxia.
“Right away, I knew it was something really special,” said the study’s head author, Jane Voight, curator emerita of invertebrates at the Field Museum in Chicago in a statement. “I’d never seen anything like it.”
She had been tasked with identifying the fun-size cephalopod after receiving its preserved body in the mail.
The cute creature was first spotted in 2015 during an excursion aboard the E/V Nautilus in partnership with the Darwin Foundation (CDF) and the Galápagos National Park Directorate.
They had dispatched a remotely-piloted submersible on the sea floor near Darwin Island on the northern part of the Galapagos archipelago.
While scouring the bottom 5,800 feet below the water’s surface, the camera picked up the golfball-sized mollusk sitting in the sand.
“He’s tiny! It’s blue!” one excited scientist was recorded exclaiming while spying the sub’s footage.
The team was so intrigued by the miniature mollusk that they contacted Voight, initially forwarding her a pic of the critter, before sending her the whole shebang.
Examining the dinky ink-squirter was tricky as it was one of a kind.
“When you describe a new species of octopus, you have to look at all the parts, including the mouth, the beak, and the teeth,” said Voight. “And to see those things, you have to cut the specimen open. We only had the one specimen, so I didn’t want to take it apart.”
Instead, the team used CT scans to snap thousands of X-ray images, and then used these to create a 3D facsimile that showed its insides sans having to slice and dice.
Among other unique attributes, the digital dissection revealed an intricate map of its internal organs and mouth, which helped confirm it was a new species.
The critter, Microeledone galapagensis, is a lot smaller than the rest of its family, which primarily resides in the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica.
“Its stubby little arms with only one row of suckers set it apart from most octopus we are familiar with,” said Voight, adding that its unique purple and blue pigmentation sets it apart from similarly-shaped octopuses, CBS reported.
The expert believes that this cerulean hue is actually a form of camouflage.
“If the octopus grabs a prey item that emits light, that light may attract predators that might then eat the octopus,” she said. “So the octopus puts its dark-colored web over the prey item, keeping itself safe.”
Voight felt honored to describe the life form to science.
“These are little octopuses that live in the deep sea, and hardly anybody on Earth has ever gotten to see them,” she said. “I just feel lucky that I got to work with them.”
Voight added that the little blue octopus is proof that there is so much of the ocean that has yet to be explored.
“If you took all the land on Earth and pieced it together, you would not cover the Pacific Ocean,” she said.
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