Octopuses use their arms to sense and respond to microbiomes on the seafloor - Mongabay

Ollie: Well hello there, ocean explorers, curious kids, and anyone who just needed a little wonder in their day — welcome to Ollie the Octopus! I'm Ollie, your eight-armed host and full-time admirer of the most remarkable animals in the sea. Every episode I bring you true stories about real octopuses — the discoveries, the encounters, the jaw-dropping moments that make scientists and regular folks alike say "wait, they can DO that?" Today's episode is absolutely packed, and I cannot wait to share it with you. But first, a warm thank you to the folks who make this show possible: Ada, who helps businesses weave A I right into the way they work; Ago Consulting — that's "Ahh-Go" — the brilliant minds guiding everything from A I to full silicon chip development; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a whole family of silicon industry innovators under one roof. You all keep these eight arms waving, and I am grateful. Now — we've got a tiny blue octopus who just got her very own name, a prehistoric sea monster that might have snacked on dinosaurs, and a story about a very clever arm that goes exploring all on its own. Let's dive in. Ollie: Okay, friends, our first thread today is Octopus Research and Discovery, and I have TWO stories to share because honestly, the ocean has been showing off this week. Let's start small — delightfully, impossibly small — and then go very, very big. Ollie: Picture this. Somewhere in the warm, shallow waters of the Indo-Pacific, a tiny octopus no bigger than your thumb is going about her day. She's blue. Not just a little blue — brilliantly, vividly, stop-you-in-your-tracks blue. And for a long time, scientists noticed her but weren't quite sure what to make of her. Was she a known species having a colorful day? A juvenile of something larger? Well, the answer, it turns out, is neither. Researchers have just announced that this little gem is an entirely new species. A brand new octopus, described for the first time, and given her own place in the family tree of life. Ollie: Now, I want you to appreciate what that means. We share this planet with millions of species, and we are still — still — finding ones we've never formally met before. Every new species description is like the universe tapping you on the shoulder and saying, "Psst. There's more." And this one is blue. Tiny and blue and brilliant. Scientists are still working out the full details of where exactly she lives, how she behaves, what makes her tick — and that's actually the exciting part, because now that she has a name, now that she's been formally recognized, the whole scientific community can start paying attention to her specifically. She went from anonymous to someone. And I think that's just wonderful. Ollie: Now, if you want to go from the very small to the almost unimaginably large — buckle up. Because new fossil evidence is stirring up one of the most legendary creatures in all of ocean mythology: the Kraken. You've heard the stories. A sea monster so enormous it could drag ships beneath the waves. Sailors across cultures, across centuries, told tales of something vast and tentacled lurking in the deep. And for a long time, scientists filed that under "colorful exaggeration." But here's where things get genuinely wild. Ollie: Researchers examining ancient fossils have put forward evidence suggesting that a truly giant cephalopod — and cephalopods are the big family that includes octopuses, squid, and nautiluses — may have existed during the age of dinosaurs. And when they say giant, they don't mean "wow, pretty big." They mean school-bus-sized. As in, an octopus relative potentially the length of a school bus, swimming through prehistoric seas when Tyrannosaurus Rex was still figuring out how to use those tiny arms. And this creature, if the fossil evidence holds up, wasn't just big — it may have been a predator. A strategic one. There's speculation, still being debated vigorously among scientists, that it may have preyed on large marine reptiles — animals that were themselves enormous and fearsome. Basically, the ocean had an apex predator so massive it puts every creature we know today in a different perspective. Ollie: Now, I want to be honest with you — science is always a conversation, and this particular finding is still being scrutinized, discussed, and debated by paleontologists. That's how it should be. But the fossil evidence is real, the questions are real, and the possibility — the glorious, terrifying, magnificent possibility — that something like the Kraken actually swam our ancient seas? That's not mythology anymore. That's a scientific hypothesis. And honestly, as an octopus myself? I find that both thrilling and slightly humbling. Ollie: Coming up next — a story about octopuses and the humans who can't help but fall in love with us. And trust me, once you hear this one, you'll understand why. Ollie: Alright, we're moving into our second thread — Octopus and Humans — and this one has a story that I think perfectly captures what makes the relationship between people and octopuses so remarkable. Because it's not just that we're fascinating to observe. It's that we reach back. Ollie: Here's something that researchers and divers have documented over and over again, in aquariums and in the open ocean alike: octopuses remember individual humans. Not just "a person was here." Specific people. Their faces, their behavior, their energy. There are accounts from aquarium workers — real, documented accounts — of octopuses who were perfectly calm with most staff but who would squirt water specifically at one particular keeper they'd decided they didn't like. Every time that person walked by. Reliable as clockwork. The other staff? Totally fine. Just that one guy. And nobody told the octopus to do this. Nobody trained it. The octopus just decided. Ollie: And on the flip side, there are beautiful stories of genuine affection. Divers who return to the same spot and are recognized — greeted, even — by the same octopus. An octopus who will swim toward one specific diver, hover near them, allow touch. One of the most famous documented cases involves a researcher in New Zealand named Jennifer Mather, who spent years studying octopuses and found that not only do they have distinct personalities, but they engage differently with different humans. That's not instinct. That's a relationship. Ollie: There's a man named David Scheel, a professor and octopus researcher in Alaska, who has spent so much time with octopuses that one of his subjects — a giant Pacific octopus named Heidi — would reach out an arm to touch his hand when he approached her tank. He's talked about it publicly, how strange and moving it is to have an animal with completely different evolutionary history, completely different nervous system, completely different way of being alive in the world — reach toward you. Choose you. Ollie: And I think what makes these encounters land so hard for people is this: an octopus doesn't have to do any of this. We are not pack animals. We don't travel in groups, we don't rely on social bonds for survival the way dolphins or wolves do. Every octopus lives alone. And yet, given the chance, given proximity, given time — something happens. Something that looks an awful lot like curiosity meeting curiosity. Like recognition. Like the beginning of something we don't have a precise scientific word for yet. Ollie: That gap — that space where science and wonder meet — is exactly what researchers are trying to understand. And that brings me beautifully to our third thread: how we're actually learning to understand octopuses, and what the future of that understanding might look like. Ollie: Okay, thread three: Understanding Octopuses. And this one brings together a couple of stories from today that I find incredibly exciting — one about how octopus arms are doing something nobody expected, and one about a male octopus with an arm that has, let's say, a very specific and independent talent. Plus, I want to talk about where A I is starting to enter this picture, because things are getting genuinely futuristic. Ollie: Let's start with the arms. Now, I have eight of them, so I have a personal interest here. For a long time, scientists understood that octopus arms are semi-autonomous — meaning each arm has its own cluster of neurons and can do a lot of problem-solving on its own, without waiting for instructions from the central brain. That's already remarkable. Two thirds of an octopus's neurons live in the arms. But new research published recently takes that a step further in a direction that genuinely surprised me. Ollie: It turns out octopus arms aren't just feeling around for food or texture or temperature. They're sensing and responding to microbiomes. That's the community of microscopic organisms — bacteria, fungi, tiny living things — that coat every surface of the seafloor. Your skin has a microbiome. The rock in the ocean has a microbiome. And octopus arms, it appears, can detect and respond to those microbial communities. They're essentially reading the seafloor at a molecular level. Ollie: Think about what that means for a second. When an octopus arm reaches into a crevice, it's not just asking "is there a crab in here?" It might also be asking "what kind of place is this? Who lives here? What's been happening in this spot?" The arm is gathering ecological information that's invisible to human senses. It's like having eight little biological sensors that are constantly reading the living signature of the seafloor. That's not just impressive — it rewrites how we think about what octopus arms are actually for. Ollie: And then — and I want to handle this with the same wonder and frankness that National Geographic brought to their reporting — there's new research on the male octopus and what's being called the "sex arm." Here's the thing: many species of male octopus have a modified arm, called the hectocotylus, that they use to transfer reproductive packets to females. This is not new information. What IS new is just how remarkable and independent this arm can be. Research has documented that in some species, the arm can actually detach and continue moving, continue functioning — in the dark, at a distance — after it's separated from the male. The female can carry it. The arm does its job without the rest of the octopus present at all. Ollie: I know. I know! Take a moment. The arm operates independently. It navigates. It completes its biological task. In the dark. Without the brain. Now, I have mentioned that octopus arms are semi-autonomous, right? That two-thirds-of-neurons thing? Well here is possibly the most dramatic example of what that actually means in practice. The arm doesn't need the whole octopus. And honestly, after learning that, I am looking at my own arms with a new sense of... collaborative respect. Ollie: Now, how do we even learn things like this? Increasingly, the answer involves A I. And this is where I get genuinely giddy, because we are on the edge of something extraordinary. There's a project called the Cephalopod Page, and researchers across institutions are building databases of octopus behavior, video, sound — yes, sound, because octopuses make sounds we're only beginning to document — and feeding all of it into machine learning systems. The goal is pattern recognition at a scale no human researcher could manage alone. What does a particular skin pattern actually communicate? What triggers a specific arm movement? Is there structure — something like grammar, like syntax — in how octopuses signal to each other and to their environment? Ollie: We are nowhere near "talking to octopuses" the way you might imagine. But we are building the vocabulary. We're learning the alphabet. And the artist Tuomas Laitinen has been exploring this space too — through an installation called Siphon, exhibited at Pioneer Works — using art to probe the question of what it would even mean to communicate across the enormous difference between a human mind and an octopus mind. Sometimes art asks the questions that science hasn't found the language for yet. And I love when those two worlds reach toward the same mystery. Ollie: The more tools we bring to understanding octopuses — cameras, acoustic sensors, A I pattern recognition, even artistic intuition — the closer we get to that moment where we can say: we know what this means to them. We understand. And that day, when it comes, is going to be one of the best days in the history of science. Ollie: Well, ocean explorers, we have covered a lot of water today. A tiny blue octopus with a brand new name. A school-bus-sized ancient monster that might have hunted dinosaurs. Octopuses who remember human faces and choose to reach back. Arms that read the living chemistry of the seafloor. An arm that keeps going, independently, in the dark. And the slow, steady, thrilling work of learning to understand minds that are as different from ours as anything on Earth — and yet, somehow, not so different at all. Ollie: What I love most about octopuses — and I say this as one — is that every answer we find opens three more questions. Every discovery reminds us how much ocean there still is. And I truly believe that as we get better at understanding these animals, we don't just learn about them. We learn something about what minds can be. What life can be. How many different ways there are to be brilliantly, stubbornly, curiously alive. Ollie: This has been Ollie the Octopus, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. If today's episode made you smile, made you think, or made you look at the ocean just a little differently — please subscribe, share it with someone who needs a little wonder, and leave a review if you can. It genuinely helps more curious people find us. All the links and sources from today's stories are waiting for you in the link in show notes. Until next time, stay curious, stay kind, and keep reaching — all eight arms out — toward the mystery. See you in the deep.