These crevices could be such a good octopus environment that the booming population is forced to spill over into the dangerously warm region outside. The team suspects there must be more octopuses living inside crevices in rocks where the water is cool and rich in oxygen. However, the sheer number of what the scientists think were doomed octopuses and their eggs suggests that there's a better habitat nearby. None had any sign of a developing embryo.ĭorado Outcrop is not a great place to start an octopus family. The researchers could only guess that the 186 eggs that were attached to the rocks faced the same challenges. Indeed, the octopuses the scientists observed showed evidence of severe stress. So it doesn't make sense for deep-sea octopuses to brood eggs in warm water, scientists say: That's usually suicide. Exposure to higher temperatures jump-starts their metabolism, fueling a need for more oxygen than warm water can provide. Unexpected discoveries like this can dramatically change our understanding of how the oceans work."ĭeep-sea octopuses usually live in cold waters. The researchers saw something unusual and stopped to find out what it was. "These surprising observations show us how a deep-sea animal reproduces," says Barbara Ransom, a program director in the National Science Foundation's Division of Ocean Sciences, which funded the research. And this nursery was situated alongside the warm fluids issuing from the cracks in the outcrop. Stranger still was that nearly all the octopuses seemed to be mothers, each guarding a clutch of eggs. That in itself was strange - Muusoctopus are normally loners. Up to 100 of them occupied every available rock in the area. The octopuses are an unknown species of the genus Muusoctopus - pink, dinner-plate-sized creatures with enormous eyes. They didn't count on finding dozens of octopuses huddled around those openings. Geochemists explored the outcrop in a submersible, hoping to collect samples of the warm fluids that emerge from cracks in the rocks. 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. "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. 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. It's also home to weird animals that scientists are only just getting to know. The seafloor is an alien landscape, with crushing pressures, near-total darkness and fluids wafting from cracks in the Earth's crust. We know more about the surface of the moon than we do about the bottom of the ocean.
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