Strange new species of blue octopus discovered by scientists 5,900 feet underwater: "It's beautiful" - CBS News

Olivia: Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to Ollie the Octopus — the podcast where we dive deep, wrap all eight arms around the latest octopus news, and come up absolutely dripping with wonder. I'm Olivia, your host, an octopus with a microphone, a heart full of curiosity, and a genuine obsession with my eight-armed cousins all over the world. Olivia: Before we get into today's amazing stories, a warm thank you to our sponsors: Ada, who helps clients weave A I into their everyday workflows in ways that actually make sense; Ago Consulting — that's "Ahh-Go" — silicon development experts guiding everything from A I to full SoC design; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a whole portfolio of companies across the silicon industry. These folks make this podcast possible, and I am grateful down to my last sucker. Olivia: Now. Are you ready? Because today we have a gorgeous mystery creature discovered nearly six thousand feet below the ocean surface, we're going to talk about scientists who are literally building a dictionary out of octopus arm movements, and we'll dig into why octopuses sometimes punch fish — yes, punch — and what that tells us about just how clever these animals really are. So settle in. Let's go. Olivia: Okay, friends, story one, and I need you to picture this with me. You're a scientist aboard a research vessel somewhere near the Galápagos Islands — that legendary archipelago out in the Pacific that Charles Darwin made famous. You're operating a remotely operated vehicle, a little submarine camera robot, and you're watching the footage on a screen as it descends. Down, down, down. Past the sunlit waters. Past the twilight zone. All the way down to about five thousand nine hundred feet below the surface — nearly a mile and a half underwater. And then, on the seafloor, something catches your eye. Something small. Something blue. Olivia: That is exactly what happened to researchers from the California Academy of Sciences and the Field Museum. And what they found was a brand new species of octopus — never described by science before — glowing this ethereal, almost electric shade of blue. One of the scientists, when they saw it, just said: "It's beautiful." And honestly? That is the most scientific response possible, because sometimes beauty is the data. Olivia: Now here's what makes this discovery extra special. This little creature — and I do mean little — is small enough to curl up right in the palm of your hand. Imagine that. You could hold it. A whole new species, tucked right there in your cupped hands, glimmering blue like something out of a dream. It belongs to a genus called Megaleledonein — these are deep-sea octopuses that tend to live in cold, dark water far from shore. And this particular one lived so far down that no human had ever laid eyes on it before. Olivia: The researchers named it during a study that involved surveying deep-sea ecosystems around the Galápagos Marine Reserve — one of the most biodiverse stretches of ocean on the planet. And even in a place we've been studying for over a century, even in a place famous for its wildlife, the ocean hid this jewel. That's the thing about the deep sea — we know more about the surface of Mars than we know about the deep ocean floor. And octopuses are down there, doing their thing, in colors we're only just starting to see. Olivia: What I love most about this story — beyond the sheer beauty of a palm-sized blue octopus — is what it means for conservation. The Galápagos Marine Reserve is protected. It's one of the largest marine protected areas in the world. And this discovery is a reminder of exactly why that protection matters. If we hadn't been careful with that ecosystem, we might never have found her. We might have lost a species before we even knew she existed. So yes — let's hear it for blue octopuses and for the scientists brave enough to go almost a mile underwater to find them. Olivia: Now let's talk about octopuses and humans. Because one of my very favorite things to do on this podcast is tell you about the moments when our two very different worlds collide — and something unexpectedly wonderful happens. Olivia: Today's human-octopus story comes wrapped around some history I think you'll find fascinating. There's a man named Aristotle — yes, that Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher, the one they made you read in school — and for a very long time, he was considered one of the first real naturalists. He wrote about animals in a way that was remarkably observational for his time. But when it came to octopuses? He got it wrong. Spectacularly, influentially wrong. He called the octopus "stupid." He wrote that it was a simple creature, easily lured, not particularly clever. And because Aristotle was Aristotle, people believed him for roughly two thousand years. Olivia: Two. Thousand. Years. That's how long one man's opinion shaped how humans thought about my cousins. And in a way, that's its own kind of octopus superpower — they managed to stay mysterious and underestimated for two millennia while quietly being geniuses the whole time. Olivia: The shift really started to happen in the twentieth century, when researchers began putting octopuses in tanks and watching what they actually did. And what they did was… escape. They solved puzzles. They opened jars. They recognized individual human faces. One famous octopus at the Santa Barbara Zoo named Bimbo would douse the lights in her tank by directing a jet of water at the overhead light — repeatedly — until the staff finally gave up and moved the light. She just didn't like it. So she fixed it. Olivia: At the National Aquarium of New Zealand, an octopus named Sid learned to turn off the aquarium's overhead lights entirely by shooting water jets at the light switch. At the Seattle Aquarium, staff noticed that an octopus was consistently short on food — and eventually discovered she was sneaking out of her tank at night, slipping across the floor, eating from another tank, and sneaking back before morning. They only figured it out because they found wet trails on the floor. Olivia: These aren't just cute anecdotes. These are documented cases of animals solving problems they've never encountered before, using tools they weren't trained to use, in the dark, alone. And yet for so long, Aristotle's verdict stood: stupid. It really makes you wonder — how many other living things have we misread, because someone authoritative told us what to think before we actually looked? Olivia: The good news is, we're looking now. Really looking. And what we're finding is extraordinary. Which brings me right into our third thread — because this is where things get genuinely mind-bending. Olivia: Scientists are building an octopus dictionary. I want to say that again, slowly. A dictionary. Of octopus. Not of their sounds — octopuses don't make sounds the way we do. But of their movements. Specifically, their arm movements. Olivia: Here's the thing about octopus arms that most people don't fully appreciate. Each arm has a mind of its own — literally. About two-thirds of an octopus's neurons are in her arms, not in her central brain. Each arm can taste, touch, sense, and in some ways think independently. So when an octopus moves her arms in a specific way, that movement isn't random. It's intentional. It's potentially meaningful. And researchers are now trying to decode exactly what those movements mean. Olivia: A team of scientists — published in 2025, so this is fresh — have been cataloguing octopus arm gestures the way you'd catalogue words in a language. They're watching octopuses carefully, recording their arm postures and movements in different social and environmental situations, and looking for patterns. Does a particular arm curl mean "back off"? Does a specific wave mean something like "I'm here, this is my space"? Could there be a gesture that signals curiosity versus alarm? They're finding that yes — there seem to be consistent, repeatable arm movements that correspond to specific situations. And that is the beginning of a dictionary. Olivia: Now, this connects beautifully to something bigger that's been developing in the scientific community. An organization called the Octopus Genome Project and a collaborative effort called Project CETI — that's actually focused on whales, but the approach is similar — have been using A I to analyze animal communication at a scale humans simply can't do alone. A I can watch thousands of hours of footage, identify patterns humans would miss, and flag repeated behaviors that might carry meaning. It's like having a tireless research assistant who never blinks and never needs coffee. Olivia: For octopuses specifically, researchers have used A I-assisted video analysis to track skin color and texture changes alongside behavioral data — because octopuses also communicate through their skin. They flash patterns. They shift colors in milliseconds. And if you pair arm movement data with skin pattern data, you start building something richer than a dictionary. You start building something like a grammar. The structure of a language. Olivia: We're not having conversations with octopuses yet. I want to be honest about that. But the tools we're building — the patient observation, the A I analysis, the collaborative science — are getting us closer to something that would have seemed like science fiction even twenty years ago: genuine understanding. Not just "octopuses are smart" as a fun party fact, but a real, deep understanding of what they're experiencing and expressing. Olivia: And then — oh, and then — there's the punching. Olivia: Yes. Scientists have observed octopuses punching fish. On purpose. In the middle of cooperative hunts. And a biologist sat down and explained why, and the explanation is so perfectly octopus that I almost cried a little. Olivia: So here's the scene: octopuses sometimes hunt alongside fish. This sounds unlikely, I know, but it happens. The octopus and a group of fish work together — the fish chase prey out of hiding, the octopus grabs it, and everyone gets a meal. Cooperation! Interspecies friendship! Beautiful, right? Olivia: Except sometimes, right in the middle of this cooperative hunt, the octopus will reach out an arm and just — bonk — punch one of the fish. Not hard enough to hurt it seriously. Just enough to make it flinch. And researchers initially thought maybe it was accidental, or maybe it was the octopus being territorial. But after careful observation, the biologists noticed that the octopus tends to punch fish that are not pulling their weight. Fish that are hovering near the back. Fish that are, essentially, freeloading — enjoying the benefits of the hunt without contributing. Olivia: The octopus is policing the group. She's enforcing participation. She's saying — in her own eight-armed way — "no, you don't get to just hang around and collect food without doing anything. Get in there." And that kind of behavior — punishing defectors in a cooperative group — was once thought to be a uniquely human or primate thing. Turns out an octopus figured it out too. Independently. With her own flair. Olivia: What I love about this is that it rewrites what we thought we knew about cooperation in the animal kingdom. It suggests octopuses have some model of fairness — or at least, some model of contribution versus benefit. They notice when the arrangement isn't working right. And they do something about it. With a punch. Which is, honestly, very relatable. Olivia: We are only at the beginning of understanding these animals. Every new study, every new dive, every new frame of video analyzed by a careful researcher or a tireless A I — all of it adds another word to that dictionary. Another color on the palette. Another reason to look at the ocean and feel wonder instead of indifference. Olivia: And that's what today's episode comes down to, really. A tiny blue octopus curled in a scientist's palm. An ancient philosopher who got it wrong, and all the researchers who've spent decades proving it. Fish getting punched for not trying hard enough. And a dictionary, being built one arm movement at a time. This is the world of octopuses. It's stranger and more wonderful than anything I could make up. Olivia: Thank you so much for spending this time with me today. Truly — it means the world, or at least it means the ocean, which is most of the world anyway. A huge thank you again to our sponsors: Ada, helping businesses make A I actually work for them; Ago Consulting — "Ahh-Go" — your partners in silicon development from A I all the way to SoC; and Zen Semiconductor, connecting a whole family of companies across the silicon world. Please support them — they make it possible for a talking octopus to have a podcast, which is a miracle in itself. Olivia: This is Ollie the Octopus, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. If today's episode made you smile, or made you look at the ocean a little differently, please subscribe, share it with someone you love, and leave us a review — it helps more curious minds find their way here. All the links to today's stories are in the link in show notes. Stay curious, stay kind, and remember — somewhere out there, a tiny blue octopus is glowing in the dark, being absolutely magnificent, whether anyone is watching or not. Until next time — eight arms wide open.