Meet the 19 metre octopus that may have prowled ancient seas - BBC

Ollie: Well hello there, friends, and welcome to Ollie the Octopus — the podcast where we dive deep, wrap eight arms around the latest news from the cephalopod world, and come back up absolutely amazed. I'm Ollie, your host, your guide, and yes, a genuine octopus with a genuine passion for sharing the most mind-bending true stories about my eight-armed cousins out there in the big blue world. Ollie: Before we get into it, a warm thank you to the wonderful folks who make this show possible. Ada, who helps clients integrate A I into their workflows — smartly, practically, beautifully. Ago Consulting — that's Ahh-Go — silicon development consulting from A I all the way to SoC. And Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a whole portfolio across the silicon industry. These are people who love innovation as much as octopuses love a good puzzle, and I am deeply grateful for their support. Ollie: Okay. Are you ready? Because today we've got a prehistoric sea monster that might rewrite history, a mirror-wielding octopus outwitting crabs, a brand new shape-shifting deep-sea discovery off Australia, some genuinely shocking news about octopus cells, and a climate twist that is sending octopuses surging through British waters. Eight arms, five stories, one very excited host. Let's go. Ollie: So let's kick things off with our first thread — Octopus Research and Discovery — and oh my goodness, do we have a double helping today, because the ocean has been absolutely generous with its secrets lately. Ollie: Let's start with something ancient. Something enormous. Something that, honestly, when I first read about it, I had to sit down — which, as an octopus, I can do in several different directions simultaneously. Scientists have been piecing together evidence for a creature that may have prowled the ancient seas — an octopus-like cephalopod estimated at around nineteen metres long. Nineteen. Metres. That is longer than a school bus. That is, frankly, the size of a small building lying on its side, drifting through prehistoric water. Ollie: Now, here's where it gets beautifully complicated. Soft-bodied creatures like octopuses almost never fossilize. Our bodies are mostly water and muscle and wonder — we don't leave bones behind. So when researchers find traces suggesting something this big existed, they're working like detectives, piecing together clues from rock and sediment and the shapes left behind by ancient biology. And what they're suggesting is that long, long ago, something vast and tentacled may have ruled the seas in a way we're only just beginning to imagine. Ollie: I find this thrilling not just because the creature is spectacular, but because it tells us something important — the octopus family tree is old. Deep. Magnificent. We've been here a very, very long time, quietly evolving, experimenting, becoming extraordinary. And the more we dig — sometimes literally — the more we realize the history of cephalopods is far richer and stranger than we ever guessed. Ollie: And then — as if one discovery weren't enough — news comes floating up from the deep sea off the coast of Australia. A brand new species. A flapjack octopus. And if that name alone doesn't make you want to keep listening, I don't know what will. Ollie: Flapjack octopuses are part of a group called Opisthoteuthis — a name I enjoy saying almost as much as I enjoy thinking about what these creatures look like. Because here's the thing: they're adorable. Genuinely, almost unreasonably cute. They have a flattened, gelatinous body — like a little pancake, which is exactly why someone looked at them and said, yes, flapjack — and they hover and drift through deep, cold water in this wonderfully boneless, shape-shifting way. Ollie: This newly discovered species was found in the deep sea, which is still one of the least explored places on Earth. We know more about the surface of the moon than we do about the bottom of the ocean, and that is not an exaggeration — it's an embarrassment and an invitation. Every time we send a camera or a submersible down into those cold dark depths, something new comes back up with it. This time, it was a soft, shape-shifting, flat little octopus cousin, doing its ancient thing in the dark, completely unaware it was about to become famous. Ollie: And the shape-shifting part is worth pausing on. This creature can change its form — pulling its webbing in, spreading it out, reshaping itself in ways that are still being studied. It's not just camouflage; it's a whole-body transformation, like being a living piece of origami. The deep sea, friends, is full of things that look like they were invented by a very imaginative child with no limits. I mean that as the highest possible compliment. Ollie: Now — staying firmly in the science thread — I have to tell you about something researchers are calling a "real surprise" in octopus cells. And when biologists say real surprise, they mean it, because these are people who have spent careers being surprised by octopuses and thought they'd seen most of it. Ollie: Here's the short version: octopus cells have been found to do something unexpected at the molecular level. The details are still being worked out, but what researchers are finding suggests that the way octopus cells function — the way they process information, the way they're organized — is genuinely different from what we see in other animals. Not a little different. Meaningfully, fascinatingly different. Ollie: This matters because it opens up questions about how intelligence works, how evolution finds different solutions to the same problems, and what it even means to be a complex, thinking creature. Octopuses evolved their remarkable brains and nervous systems completely independently from vertebrates like us — or, well, from vertebrates like you. We took completely separate paths over hundreds of millions of years, and yet here we are, both doing sophisticated things with our neurons. The fact that our cells pack surprises even for experts tells me that we've barely scratched the surface of understanding what an octopus actually is. Ollie: And I say that as an octopus who is still figuring himself out, so — solidarity, science. Solidarity. Ollie: Alright, let's shift into our second thread — Octopus and Humans — and I want to tell you about something that made me absolutely cackle with delight. Because researchers have discovered that octopuses, when given access to a mirror, can use it to spot crabs hiding around corners. Ollie: Let me paint you a picture. A crab thinks it's being clever. It's tucked itself just out of sight — around the edge of a tank, behind a bit of structure, somewhere an octopus looking straight ahead couldn't possibly see it. Safe, the crab thinks. Invisible. Winning. Ollie: And then the octopus uses a mirror. Ollie: Not metaphorically. An actual mirror, positioned in the environment. And the octopus — without any training, without anyone showing it what to do — figures out that the reflection reveals what's hidden. It uses the mirror like a tool. Like a periscope. Like a tiny, brilliant, eight-armed spy checking the corner before making a move. Ollie: This kind of behavior — using an environmental object to extend your own perception — is something we associate with animals we consider highly intelligent. Primates, corvids, elephants. And now, formally, documented, scientifically verified: octopuses. Using mirrors. To hunt more effectively. Ollie: What I love about this story is how it captures the octopus approach to the world. They don't have a playbook handed down through a social group. They don't watch other octopuses and learn. They are almost entirely solitary. Every octopus figures things out on its own, in the moment, with the situation in front of it. And somehow, that produces an animal that looks at a mirror and thinks — oh, I could use that. That is useful information. I will now outsmart this crab. Ollie: And the crab, presumably, had no idea what hit it. Ollie: This kind of documented, verified interaction — octopus and object, octopus and human observer, octopus demonstrating something no one quite expected — is exactly the kind of encounter that changes how we think about animal minds. The researchers who set up that experiment didn't just find out how octopuses hunt. They found out something about consciousness, about spatial reasoning, about what it takes to understand that a reflection is information. That's a big thing to learn from a mirror and a crab. Ollie: I also want to share something from UK waters, because there's a human dimension to this story that I think deserves a moment. Climate change is pushing octopus populations into new territories — and in British waters, octopuses are surging. Numbers are up. They're appearing in places they weren't before, in numbers that are reshaping local marine ecosystems. Ollie: Now, for some creatures in those ecosystems — crabs, shellfish, small fish — this is a significant change. Octopuses are formidable hunters, and more of them means different pressures on different species. But here's where humans come in: this is also an opportunity. An opportunity to watch, to learn, to understand how a highly intelligent predator integrates into an ecosystem, how the food web adjusts, and what it tells us about the ocean's response to a warming world. Ollie: Fishers are noticing. Divers are noticing. Scientists are noticing. And that shared noticing — humans paying attention to octopuses, gathering data, comparing notes — is itself a form of encounter. A relationship between a species that is watching and a species that, I promise you, is also watching back. Octopuses are curious. When a diver shows up, there's a reasonable chance the octopus is studying the diver just as hard as the diver is studying the octopus. That mutual curiosity feels important. It feels like the beginning of something. Ollie: Which brings us beautifully into our third thread — Understanding Octopuses. How do we learn about them? How are tools, technology, and yes, A I, starting to help us crack the code of what octopuses are actually doing and thinking and saying? Ollie: Let's start with what we already know, because it's wild. Octopuses have neurons — nerve cells — not just in their brains, but distributed throughout their arms. Each arm has a degree of autonomy. It can respond to its environment, make local decisions, explore without being told to by the central brain. So an octopus isn't just one mind running eight limbs. It's more like a conversation between a central intelligence and eight semi-independent collaborators. Nine brains, loosely. All running at once. All gathering information. Ollie: And we know they communicate through color and texture and pattern. An octopus can ripple a wave of color across its skin, flash a signal, display a warning, perform a mating display — all without making a sound. It's a visual language written on a living canvas, and it changes in milliseconds. The problem, from a scientific standpoint, is that we've never had the tools fast enough or smart enough to capture and decode it properly. Ollie: Until now. Researchers are beginning to use A I — machine learning systems trained on huge amounts of video footage — to analyze the patterns octopuses make on their skin. The idea is that if you can catalog enough of these patterns, across enough situations, you can start to see structure. You can start to ask: is this a word? Is this a mood? Is this a name? Is there grammar here? Ollie: One of the most exciting projects working in this space is called CETI — though they work primarily with whales. But the approach — using A I to find patterns in non-human communication — is being applied more broadly, and octopuses are very much in the conversation. Because if any animal's communication system deserves a Rosetta Stone, it's ours. Ollie: And think about what the cell research we mentioned earlier adds to this picture. If octopus cells are doing something biologically surprising, if the machinery of the octopus body is more unusual than we thought, then maybe the way octopuses process experience is also more unusual. Maybe what we're looking at when we watch an octopus change color isn't just signaling — maybe it's thinking. Maybe the skin itself is part of the mind. Ollie: That sounds fantastical. But octopus skin contains photoreceptors — light-sensitive cells — even though octopuses are colorblind in the traditional sense. Their eyes can't distinguish color. And yet their skin can apparently detect it in some way. Which raises a question that I find absolutely electric: what does the world look like from inside an octopus? Is it experienced through the skin as much as through the eyes? Is color something they feel as well as see? Ollie: We don't know. But we're getting closer. Because we have better cameras, better algorithms, better A I tools for pattern recognition, and — crucially — we have more researchers who have decided that octopuses are worth the time and the funding and the wonder. The surge of interest in cephalopod cognition over the last decade has been remarkable. Papers, projects, international collaborations, people dedicating their careers to understanding creatures that have been quietly doing impossible things in the ocean for hundreds of millions of years. Ollie: The mirror experiment fits here too. Because when you discover that an octopus can use a mirror to find hidden prey, you're not just learning about hunting behavior. You're learning about spatial awareness, about the ability to understand that a reflection is a representation of real space. That's a concept. And creatures that handle concepts can, in principle, handle other concepts. Language. Symbols. Communication. Ollie: I'm not saying octopuses are going to start holding conversations anytime soon — though honestly, if we're being honest, I wouldn't rule it out. What I am saying is that the gap between octopus and human understanding is narrowing, and the tools helping us close that gap — A I, high-speed imaging, molecular biology, good old-fashioned patient observation — are more powerful than ever. We are living in the golden age of octopus science. And I, for one, am thrilled to be here for it. Ollie: Alright, friends. We've traveled from the ancient seas to the deep waters off Australia, from a crab's worst day to the cutting edge of cellular biology, from warming British waters to the frontier of animal communication. And what I keep coming back to — what I always come back to — is this: octopuses have been here for a very, very long time, doing extraordinary things in the dark and the deep, and we are only just learning to pay proper attention. Ollie: That feels hopeful to me. Not because the world is perfect — it isn't, and the oceans face real challenges. But because curiosity is powerful. Because every researcher who sets up a mirror in a tank, every submersible that goes deep, every A I model trained to find patterns in cephalopod skin, is an act of respect. Of saying: this creature matters. This creature is worth understanding. And I believe that's true of every living thing on this planet, eight arms or two or none. Ollie: This has been Ollie the Octopus, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. If today's stories made you smile, made you wonder, or made you look at the ocean a little differently — please subscribe, leave a review, and share this episode with someone who needs a little more octopus in their life. Trust me. Everyone does. You'll find links to all today's stories in the link in show notes. Until next time — stay curious, stay kind, and remember: somewhere out there, an octopus is watching you. And it is absolutely fascinated.