A team of deep-sea scientists discovered one mother. In recent research, they detail the discovery of a female octopus performing an unusual behavior for its species: protecting and carrying a clutch of giant eggs. Scientists have discovered that the mama squid probably belongs to a previously unknown species of cephalopod.
The discovery was actually made in 2015 by scientists from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), the GEOMAR Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research Kiel in Germany and the University of South Florida. They were using their robots in the deep basins of the Gulf of California, hoping to learn more about how animals live in low-oxygen areas, when they came across an unexpected sight.
The pink-colored squid was observed at a depth of about 8,419 feet (2,566 meters), its tentacles carefully hugging the eggs. Octopuses usually lay their eggs in clusters that are either attached to the sea floor or drift along the water. However, some species engage in this more protective behavior, also known as straining. While burrowing has been observed in deep-sea squid before, it never quite looked like this. For starters, the squid’s eggs were quite huge, measuring about half an inch in diameter, while eggs belonging to other known burrowing deep-sea squids are about half that size. The octopus also carried only about 30 to 40 eggs, compared to the sometimes thousands of eggs seen in other species.
After further studying their footage and comparing it to other squid sightings, the team concluded that they had indeed discovered a previously unknown species – one likely belonging to the Gonatidae family, also called squid. The team’s research describing their findings was published last month in the newspaper Ecology; MBARI too released a short video clip of Octopus on his YouTube channel last week.
“The deep sea is the largest living space on Earth and there is still much to discover. Our unexpected encounter with a giant egg-napping octopus caught the attention of everyone in the ship’s control room,” said Steven Haddock, MBARI’s principal scientist and principal investigator during the 2015 expedition. declaration published by MBARI. “This remarkable observation underscores the diversity of ways in which animals adapt to the unique challenges of life in the deep.”
Guarding is a drastic strategy for octopuses, as the mother will not eat while protecting her eggs and will perish soon after hatching. And this newly discovered octopus species may have it even harder than others, as it can take one to four years for their young to emerge, due to the larger size of the eggs, the researchers say (current nesting record will appear 4.5 years for a specific species of deep-sea octopus). But nesting makes the eggs more likely to survive. The researchers say that this octopus may have evolved to rear giant eggs as a new strand of this adaptation, with stable deep-sea resources possibly allowing them to invest more in the individual survival of their offspring.
In any case, as is often the case in science, this discovery will provide researchers with more mysteries to try to solve.
“Advanced underwater robots are helping us better understand the life of deep-sea squid, revealing fascinating new information about their biology and behavior. Each new observation is another piece of the puzzle,” lead author Henk-Jan Hoving, a former MBARI member who now leads the Deep Sea Biology Working Group at GEOMAR, said in a statement.