MBARI scientists film rare seven-arm octopus feeding in the deep sea - DIVE Magazine

Olivia: Well hello there, ocean explorers, and welcome to Ollie the Octopus — the show where we dive deep into the wild, wonderful, and occasionally mind-bending world of real octopuses. I'm Olivia, your eight-armed host, and yes, before you ask, all eight arms are fully occupied with today's episode notes. I am so glad you're here. Olivia: Before we dive in, a warm wave of gratitude to the incredible sponsors who make this show possible. First, Ada — the team that helps businesses actually integrate A I into their everyday workflows in ways that make sense. Then there's Ago Consulting — that's "Ahh-Go" — the brilliant minds behind silicon development consulting, from A I all the way to SoC. And finally, Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a whole portfolio of companies spanning the silicon industry. These folks are doing genuinely cool things, and we are grateful for every one of them. Olivia: Now. Are you ready? Because today we have ancient sea monsters, a tiny blue octopus that sounds like it came out of a fairy tale, a seven-armed wonder caught on camera in the deep dark ocean, and so much more. Grab something cozy, settle in, and let's go. Olivia: Alright, let's kick things off with our first thread — Octopus Research and Discovery — and friends, I have to tell you, this one made me do a full eight-arm happy dance. Olivia: Let's start small and get bigger. Way bigger. First, the small: scientists have just confirmed a brand new octopus species discovered near the Galapagos Islands, and it is tiny, it is blue, and it lives in the deep sea. I mean. Tiny. Blue. Deep-sea. That's basically the recipe for something straight out of a dream. Olivia: The Galapagos, if you don't know, is already one of the most ecologically stunning places on the planet — it's that archipelago off the coast of Ecuador where evolution basically went wild and made all kinds of incredible creatures. And apparently the ocean floor nearby has been hiding secrets, because this little octopus was hanging out down there in the deep, just living its best tiny blue life, completely unbeknownst to science. Olivia: Researchers confirmed it as a genuinely new species — not a known octopus in an unusual color, not a juvenile of something we already recognized, but a real, bona fide, never-been-described-before species. And the color! That blue isn't just for show — deep-sea creatures often have extraordinary pigmentation for reasons we're still working to understand. Some scientists think it might be related to how they interact with the limited light that filters down at those depths. Others think it might play a role in communication or camouflage. Either way, this tiny creature is already raising big questions. Olivia: And speaking of big — oh, we are going big now. Because while that little blue beauty is adorable and new, scientists have also been looking in the other direction entirely. Not into the future of octopus discovery, but into the deep, deep past. And what they found there is — I don't say this lightly — absolutely terrifying in the best possible way. Olivia: Picture this: it is one hundred million years ago. The Cretaceous period. Dinosaurs are walking the land. And in the oceans — in these vast, ancient seas — there are octopuses. Enormous octopuses. We're talking creatures that researchers believe could reach up to sixty feet in length, with bone-crushing jaws, and the strength and predatory instincts to be the apex predators of their entire ecosystem. Olivia: Sixty feet, friends. That is longer than a school bus. That is basically a living, eight-armed, jet-propelled, ocean-dwelling nightmare — if you happened to be a mosasaur or an ammonite trying to go about your day. Olivia: Scientists have been piecing together fossil evidence — and octopuses, being soft-bodied, don't leave a lot of fossils, which makes this research genuinely hard — but there are clues in the fossil record that suggest these ancient cephalopods were not just present in Cretaceous oceans, they were dominant. They were the bosses. The top of the food chain. Olivia: And I have to say, as an octopus myself, I find this deeply, deeply satisfying information. We have always been remarkable. We have always been powerful. It's just nice to have the fossil record starting to back that up. Olivia: Now let's talk about something a little more recent — well, relatively speaking — because while the ancient giants are extraordinary, there is another octopus story from the deep that stopped me in my tracks. MBARI — that's the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute — their scientists recently filmed a seven-arm octopus feeding in the deep sea. And that footage is breathtaking. Olivia: Now wait, I hear you asking — seven arms? Olivia, you literally just said octopuses have eight arms. You said it yourself. Did you forget how to count? And the answer is: no, I absolutely did not forget how to count, and this is one of my favorite fun facts about this particular animal. Olivia: The seven-arm octopus — its scientific name is Haliphron atlanticus — is one of the largest octopuses in the world by weight. And it appears to only have seven arms, but it actually has eight. The eighth arm, in males, is coiled up in a little sac near the eye and is only used during reproduction. So it's hidden! It's a secret arm! Which, honestly, I respect enormously as a life choice. Olivia: These animals are rare. They live in deep, open ocean water, which makes them incredibly hard to study — you can't just set up a camera and wait, because deep open ocean is vast and dark and just enormous. So getting footage of one actively feeding is a genuinely significant scientific event. MBARI's remotely operated vehicles went down into that deep water and caught this animal in the act — hunting, eating, being magnificent — and the footage is exactly the kind of thing that reminds you how much ocean we still haven't seen. Olivia: Okay, thread two — Octopus and Humans. And for this one, I want to tell you about a relationship between a human and an octopus that has become, in ocean-loving circles, something of a legend. Because while today's headlines are full of ancient giants and deep-sea discoveries, the story that keeps coming back to me — the one that I think captures something essential about why octopuses matter to us, and why we matter to them — is the story of Inky. Olivia: You may have heard of Inky. If you haven't, settle in, because this is one of the great escape stories of the twenty-first century. Olivia: Inky was a common New Zealand octopus — a big, scarred, rough-looking fellow — who arrived at the National Aquarium of New Zealand in Napier after being caught in a crayfish pot. He was missing a limb, he had a battered look about him, and from the moment he arrived, the staff noticed that he was watching everything. Every person. Every door. Every tank. Just watching, with those extraordinary eyes, taking it all in. Olivia: Inky settled in. He became a favorite. The staff loved him. He was curious and interactive in a way that surprised even experienced aquarium keepers — he'd reach his arms out through the lid of his tank to touch people's hands, he'd react differently to different staff members, he seemed to genuinely know the humans around him as individuals. Olivia: And then, one night in 2016, Inky made his move. Olivia: Somehow — and this is the part that still gets me — Inky managed to squeeze through a small gap at the top of his tank. He crossed the open floor of the aquarium. He found a drainpipe about fifty millimeters across — that's barely two inches — and he squeezed his entire body through it. The drainpipe ran for about fifty meters and led directly to Hawke's Bay. To the ocean. To freedom. Olivia: And Inky was gone. Olivia: The aquarium staff found the evidence the next morning — the damp trail across the floor, the empty tank, the pipe. No Inky. Just the beautiful, undeniable proof that he had planned and executed a perfect escape, returned to the sea, and presumably lived happily ever after doing octopus things in the wild. Olivia: The aquarium manager, Rob Yarrall, said afterward — and I love this quote — "Octopuses are very intelligent and Inky was a particularly curious boy. He would want to know what's happening." And he found out. He found out exactly what was happening on the other side of that drainpipe. Olivia: Now here's what I want you to think about, because Inky's story isn't just funny and charming — though it absolutely is both of those things. It's a window into something real and important about how octopuses relate to the world and to us. Inky wasn't just reacting. He was planning. He waited. He observed. He chose his moment. And then he executed a multi-step escape that required him to understand spatial relationships, remember a route, and physically navigate a dark, narrow pipe to get somewhere he had never been. Olivia: That is not instinct. That is thinking. And it's exactly the kind of thinking that makes octopuses — every octopus, including the tiny new blue one near the Galapagos, including the seven-arm mystery of the deep — so endlessly fascinating to the humans who encounter them. Olivia: Divers have their own versions of this story. There are well-documented accounts of wild octopuses approaching scuba divers repeatedly, bringing them objects — shells, rocks — seemingly as gifts. There are octopuses at aquariums who have learned to recognize specific humans and greet them differently than strangers, who have figured out how to dismantle equipment, who have sprayed water at staff members they apparently found annoying. These aren't rumors. These are documented, observed, verified behaviors reported by marine biologists and aquarium professionals. Olivia: Octopuses notice us. They engage with us. And increasingly, we're learning to notice and engage right back. Olivia: Which brings me perfectly — perfectly — to our third thread. Understanding Octopuses. Because here's the thing: we've been in awe of octopuses for a long time. But right now, thanks to some genuinely remarkable science and some really exciting technology, we are closer than we have ever been to understanding what is actually going on inside these extraordinary minds. Olivia: Let's start with what we know — or what we're starting to know. Octopuses have distributed nervous systems. About two-thirds of their neurons are not in their brain — they're in their arms. Each arm can act semi-independently. It can taste, touch, grip, and react without waiting for the central brain to weigh in. It's like having eight little thinking helpers attached to your body, all working at once. Which, again, I can personally vouch for as being extremely useful. Olivia: But here's the mystery that has been keeping cephalopod researchers up at night for years: octopuses are colorblind. Their eyes have only one type of photoreceptor. They should not be able to see color. And yet their camouflage is so precise, so extraordinarily accurate, that they can match not just the color but the texture and pattern of nearly any surface in milliseconds. How? HOW? Olivia: One leading theory — and it is genuinely wild — is that they might sense color through their skin. There are photoreceptors distributed across octopus skin, just like the ones in their eyes. Some scientists think octopuses might essentially be seeing light through their entire body and using that information to create their camouflage displays. They might be tasting light. Wearing color. It's one of the most extraordinary ideas in modern biology and we still don't fully understand it. Olivia: And this is where A I is starting to play a really exciting role. Researchers at institutions around the world are using machine learning and A I systems to analyze octopus behavior in ways that would simply be impossible for human observers alone. Octopus body language is incredibly complex — the patterns and textures they display, the postures of their arms, the way they move through space — all of it potentially carries information. A human watching an octopus can catch some of it. An A I system analyzing thousands of hours of footage can start to find patterns that human eyes would miss entirely. Olivia: There's even a project — a real, serious scientific project called the Octopus Communication Project — that has been exploring whether we can develop a two-way communication system with octopuses. Not teaching them human language, but meeting them on their own terms. Using their own sensory world — light, pattern, texture, touch — to build something that might, just might, constitute a conversation. Olivia: Now think about this in the context of today's stories. We have a newly confirmed octopus species near the Galapagos that we didn't even know existed until recently. We have footage of a seven-arm octopus in the deep sea that is giving us new data about how this rare creature hunts and moves. We have fossil evidence of ancient octopuses that were apex predators a hundred million years ago, suggesting a lineage of intelligence and adaptability that goes back further than we imagined. And we have A I tools that are helping us parse the complexity of octopus behavior faster and more deeply than ever before. Olivia: Every piece of this fits together. The more species we find, the more we realize how diverse octopus intelligence and behavior might be across that family. The more we study their camouflage, their communication, their problem-solving, the more we understand what that ancient lineage has been building toward. And the more A I helps us see what we couldn't see before, the more those conversations — real, meaningful, cross-species conversations — start to feel possible. Olivia: I genuinely believe we are living in a golden age of octopus science. And I say that as an octopus. I have some personal investment in this. But I also say it as someone who has watched this field grow, watched the technology improve, watched the questions get sharper and the answers get more astonishing. We are understanding these animals more deeply than any generation before us. And the picture that's emerging is more beautiful and more complex than anyone expected. Olivia: Alright, my wonderful ocean explorers. We have covered so much today — a sixty-foot Cretaceous sea monster with bone-crushing jaws, a tiny blue dreamer in the deep near the Galapagos, a seven-armed wonder caught on camera doing magnificent things, the legendary escape of Inky, and the A I-powered quest to actually understand what octopuses are saying to each other and maybe even to us. Olivia: And here's what I want to leave you with: every one of these stories, from the ancient giants to the brand-new species to the octopus who squeezed through a drainpipe to freedom — every single one of them is a reminder that the ocean is still full of wonders we haven't seen yet. That intelligence takes shapes we're only beginning to recognize. And that when we pay attention — really pay attention — the world becomes more extraordinary, not less. Olivia: Octopuses have been here for hundreds of millions of years, adapting and thriving and thinking in ways we're only just learning to understand. And I, for one, cannot wait to see what we learn next. Olivia: This has been Ollie the Octopus, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. If you loved this episode, please subscribe, share it with someone who needs a little ocean wonder in their life, and leave us a review — it genuinely helps more curious minds find the show. You can find links to all the stories we talked about today in the link in show notes. Stay curious, stay kind, and I'll see you next time — all eight arms waving.