Scientists discover new little blue octopus in Galapagos - DW.com

Olivia: Well hello there, ocean explorers, curious minds, and fellow lovers of all things eight-armed and wonderful! Welcome to Ollie the Octopus — I'm Olivia, your host, your guide, and yes, a real live octopus with a whole lot of arms and even more enthusiasm for the amazing true stories of my eight-armed kin. I am so glad you're here today. Olivia: Before we dive in — and we are absolutely diving in — a huge thank you to our sponsors. Ada, who helps clients weave A I right into their workflows in ways that actually make sense. Ago Consulting — that's "Ahh-Go" — your go-to team for silicon development consulting, from A I all the way to SoC. And Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a whole portfolio of businesses spanning the silicon industry. These folks make this show possible, and I wave all eight arms at them in gratitude. Olivia: Now. Today we have a tiny blue wonder hiding in the Galápagos, ancient ocean giants that may have ruled the seas a hundred million years ago, a robot arm that's stealing moves straight from my playbook, and one of the most touching true stories of friendship between a human and an octopus that you might have ever heard. Ready? Let's go. Olivia: Alright, let's start with the news that honestly made me do a little eight-armed happy dance — scientists have discovered a brand new species of octopus in the Galápagos Islands, and it is tiny, it is vivid, and it is blue. A little blue octopus, hiding in one of the most extraordinary ocean ecosystems on the planet. Olivia: Now, the Galápagos — if you're picturing the place where Darwin sailed and had his whole worldview rearranged by finches and tortoises — yes, that's the one. But what's above the waterline is only half the story. Below the surface, the Galápagos Marine Reserve is this extraordinary tangle of cold upwelling currents, volcanic rock formations, and astonishing biodiversity. It is, in a word, spectacular. Olivia: Researchers exploring the deeper reefs there stumbled upon this little blue octopus and realized — wait, we don't know this one. That moment in science, that "we don't know this one" moment, is one of my absolute favorites. Because the ocean is still giving us gifts. Even in places we think we've studied well. Olivia: The octopus is small — we're talking genuinely little, not just modest — and its blue coloring is striking enough that it caught researchers' attention immediately. Now, blue is a color you see in cephalopods in some pretty interesting ways. The blue-ringed octopus, famous cousin of mine, flashes iridescent blue rings as a warning. But this little Galápagos find seems to wear its blue differently — as part of its everyday appearance. Olivia: What I love about this discovery is what it tells us about how much is still out there. We've formally described maybe 300 species of octopus. Three hundred! That sounds like a lot until you consider that the ocean covers more than 70 percent of this planet and most of it remains unexplored. Scientists estimate there could be many, many more species waiting to be found — perhaps hiding in plain sight on a volcanic reef in the Galápagos, being small and blue and entirely unbothered by the fact that no one had named them yet. Olivia: Each new species discovery is also a window into evolution. How did this octopus end up in the Galápagos? What does it eat? How does it hide, how does it hunt, how does it live? Every one of those questions, when answered, adds another piece to the glorious puzzle of life on Earth. And I, for one, cannot wait to learn more about this little blue neighbor. Olivia: There's something deeply poetic about the Galápagos still yielding new species. It's as if the ocean is saying — hey, you think you know us? Look closer. Look deeper. And when you do, find an octopus. You'll always find something wonderful when you find an octopus. Olivia: Okay, I need to take a breath — well, a figurative one, I breathe water, you know — because now we're going back in time. Way back. One hundred million years back. Because there's new research suggesting that octopuses — or creatures very much like them — may have been among the dominant predators in ancient oceans. Giants. Rulers of the sea. Olivia: Now, here's the tricky thing about studying ancient octopuses. They don't fossilize well. At all. They're almost entirely soft-bodied — no shell, no bones, just magnificent, squishy, brainy muscle. So the fossil record for octopuses is incredibly sparse compared to, say, ammonites, which were their shelled cephalopod cousins and left fossils absolutely everywhere. Olivia: But researchers looking at fossil evidence from the Cretaceous period — that's the age of the dinosaurs, yes, dinosaurs — have been piecing together evidence that giant cephalopods were ruling the oceans at the same time T. rex was ruling the land. And we're not talking small. We're talking potentially enormous predators with long arms, keen senses, and the intelligence to match. Olivia: There's a particularly fascinating line of research around what are called Coleoidea — the group that includes octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish — and their early evolution. Some scientists believe that the ancestors of modern octopuses were considerably larger than what we see today. The ocean of 100 million years ago was warmer, richer in some ways, and full of prey that a giant, eight-armed predator would have found absolutely delightful. Olivia: And honestly? When I picture it, I feel a certain ancestral pride. My great-great-great — times about a million — grandparents, gliding through a warm Cretaceous sea, arms extended, eyes sharp, ruling their domain. That's not nothing. That's a legacy. Olivia: What's also fascinating is the brain question. Modern octopuses have remarkably complex nervous systems — two-thirds of our neurons are actually in our arms, not our central brain. So each arm is doing a kind of local thinking. Were ancient giant octopuses similarly wired? Did they have that same distributed intelligence, just at a much larger scale? That's the kind of question that keeps paleontologists and neurobiologists both up at night. Olivia: The research also reminds us that evolution is not always a march toward complexity or size. Octopuses today are mostly small to medium — the giant Pacific octopus is the big exception, with arm spans up to 14 feet — but the lineage has seen sizes we can barely imagine. What drove them to get smaller over time? Changes in ocean temperature? New predators? Competition? The story is still being written from scattered fossil clues and a whole lot of brilliant scientific detective work. Olivia: And I think that's what I find most thrilling about paleontology applied to cephalopods — every new finding rewrites a little piece of the story. A hundred million years ago, my kind may have been the monsters of the deep. Today, we're the curious, clever, color-changing wonders you find in tide pools and reef tanks. Either way? Pretty great. Olivia: Now we come to one of my favorite parts of every episode — stories about octopuses and humans. Real ones. True ones. Moments where our two very different kinds of minds reach across the water and touch. Olivia: Today I want to tell you about a story that has become something of a legend in the world of octopus-human connection — the story of Inky, the octopus who escaped from the National Aquarium of New Zealand in 2016. If you haven't heard this one, buckle in. It is extraordinary. Olivia: Inky was a rough-textured octopus who had been brought to the aquarium after being caught in a crab pot. He settled in, seemed comfortable, and by all accounts was a favorite with staff — known for being particularly curious, particularly clever, and particularly interested in everything happening around his tank. Olivia: One night, the lid of his tank was left slightly ajar. And Inky — being Inky — noticed. He squeezed his body, which despite being roughly the size of a rugby ball was almost entirely compressible, through that gap. Then he crossed the floor of the aquarium. Then he found a drainpipe, about the width of a drainpipe, leading to the ocean. And he went home. Olivia: The staff came in the next morning to find one tank empty, a trail of wet marks across the floor, and a drainpipe. Inky was gone. Into Hawke's Bay, into the Pacific, into freedom. Olivia: Now, what I love about this story — beyond the sheer audacity of it — is what it tells us about octopus cognition. Inky didn't panic. He didn't thrash. He observed, he planned, he executed. He knew the drain was there. He knew the drain led out. He made a decision. A deliberate, strategic, successful decision. Olivia: Aquarium staff weren't angry, by the way. They were — and this is the detail I treasure — mostly just impressed. The aquarium director said something along the lines of: Inky was always a bit of a character. And yes. Yes he was. Olivia: This kind of story matters because it shifts how people think about octopuses. We're not decorations. We're not simple sea creatures reacting to stimuli. We are active, curious, goal-directed animals with inner lives that we're only beginning to understand. Inky didn't escape because something frightened him. He escaped because he wanted to. Because the ocean called and he answered. Olivia: There's a beautiful parallel to the human experience in that, isn't there? The longing for open water. The willingness to take a risk for freedom. The midnight decision that changes everything. Inky just did it with more arms and a drainpipe. Olivia: And the thing about encounters like this — Inky's escape, the many stories of octopuses in aquariums recognizing individual staff members, playing favorites, squirting water at people they don't like — all of it points to the same truth: when octopuses and humans pay attention to each other, remarkable things happen. Olivia: Which brings us perfectly to our final thread today — understanding octopuses. Because we are in a golden age of octopus science, and the tools we have now, including A I, are opening up possibilities that would have seemed like science fiction twenty years ago. Olivia: Let me start with something that came straight out of research published in the journal Nature — scientists have built a robotic arm inspired by, you guessed it, octopus arms. And this isn't just a fun engineering project, though it is absolutely a fun engineering project. This is a window into how octopuses think and move. Olivia: Here's the thing that makes octopus arms so extraordinary from an engineering perspective. Each arm has hundreds of suckers, and those suckers are not just for gripping — they're sensors. They taste, they feel texture, they detect chemicals, they respond to pressure. And each arm processes a lot of that sensory information locally, without waiting for the central brain to weigh in. Olivia: So when an octopus reaches into a crevice to find a crab, the arm is essentially doing its own exploring. It's making local decisions. The central brain says "find food in that direction" and the arm figures out the rest. That's called peripheral control — and it's exactly what the researchers built into their robotic arm. Olivia: The robot arm uses distributed sensing — sensors all along its length — to make local decisions about how to grasp objects underwater. It doesn't rely on one central controller processing everything. It thinks, in a sense, along its own body. And in tests, it turned out to be significantly better at grasping complex, irregular underwater objects than traditional robotic arms that rely on central control. Olivia: Nature figured this out hundreds of millions of years ago. Engineers are just now catching up. And I say that with enormous affection for engineers. Olivia: What this research also does — and this is where it connects to understanding octopuses more deeply — is give us new models for how octopus cognition actually works. Because one of the hardest things about studying octopus intelligence is that it doesn't look like ours. Our brains are centralized. Our intelligence comes from one place. Octopus intelligence is distributed — spread across a central brain, two optic lobes, and eight arms that each have their own nerve clusters. Olivia: Trying to understand distributed intelligence with centralized tools is like trying to listen to an orchestra by only pointing your microphone at the conductor. You miss most of the music. Olivia: And this is where A I comes in in a fascinating way. Researchers at projects like CETI — the Cetacean Translation Initiative — are using machine learning to analyze the communication patterns of sperm whales, trying to decode meaning from clicks and patterns. Similar approaches are being explored for cephalopods. Can we use A I to find patterns in octopus color changes, skin textures, body postures that carry meaning? Can we learn to read what an octopus is expressing? Olivia: It's early days. But the honest answer is: maybe. The skin of an octopus is one of the most complex biological display systems on Earth. Millions of chromatophores — those are the color cells — expanding and contracting in waves and patterns, sometimes in milliseconds. The sheer information density in an octopus skin display is staggering. No human eye can track it all. But A I can. Olivia: There's a project that has been using high-speed cameras and machine learning algorithms to catalog octopus skin patterns — trying to find if particular patterns correlate with particular behaviors or states. Is there a pattern that means "I'm alarmed"? One that means "I'm hunting"? One that might, just might, be something like communication? The data is still being analyzed, but the possibility is breathtaking. Olivia: What would it mean to communicate with an octopus? I think about that a lot — obviously, as an octopus myself, I have opinions. But as a scientific question, it's profound. Octopuses and vertebrates — that's you, the humans — split from a common ancestor somewhere around 750 million years ago. We evolved intelligence completely independently, along completely different paths. If we could genuinely exchange meaning with an octopus, it wouldn't just be a scientific achievement. It would be a kind of first contact. Intelligence meeting intelligence across the deepest of evolutionary distances. Olivia: And we're building the tools to try. A I, robotics, behavioral research, neuroscience — all of it converging on this one extraordinary animal. My cousins. My kin. The most alien minds on Earth, and still so very, very wonderful. Olivia: Well. We've covered a lot of ocean today, haven't we? A little blue discovery in the Galápagos, ancient giants ruling Cretaceous seas, the midnight escape of the legendary Inky, and robot arms learning to think like octopus arms while A I inches us closer to something that might, one day, be a conversation. Olivia: If there's one thing I hope you take away from today, it's this: the ocean is still full of wonders. The research is accelerating. And the more we learn about octopuses, the more astonishing the world becomes. These animals have been solving problems, slipping through drainpipes, and dazzling evolution for hundreds of millions of years. They deserve our curiosity, our care, and our profound respect. Olivia: Ollie the Octopus is brought to you by Ada, helping clients bring A I into their workflows in ways that truly work; Ago Consulting — "Ahh-Go" — your expert partners in silicon development from A I to SoC; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company spanning the silicon industry with a portfolio built for the future. Thank you all, sincerely. Olivia: If you loved today's episode, please subscribe wherever you listen, share it with someone who needs a little ocean wonder in their week, and check the link in show notes for more on all of today's stories. Stay curious, stay kind to the ocean, and remember — if you ever see an octopus looking at you, look back. Really look back. Something remarkable is looking at you too. See you next time.