'Rarely Seen' Seven-Arm Octopus Spotted Off California Coast for 4th Time in 4 Decades - People.com

Olivia: Hello, hello, hello, ocean lovers — welcome to Ollie the Octopus, the show where we dive deep, wrap eight curious arms around the latest octopus news, and come back up absolutely delighted by what we found. I'm Olivia, your host, your guide, and yes — a very enthusiastic octopus who cannot stop talking about her eight-armed cousins. Today's episode is absolutely packed with wonders — a mystery octopus with a missing arm, babies hatching in the deep dark heat of the ocean floor, and a tiny blue newcomer spotted in some of the most remote waters on Earth. Before we splash in, a warm 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" Consulting — bringing sharp silicon development expertise 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 we are so grateful. Alright — ready? Ink up and let's go. Olivia: So let's start with our first thread — Octopus Research and Discovery — and oh my goodness, do we have stories for you today. Let's begin with something that made me do an actual double-take when I read it, because I genuinely thought someone had made a typo. A seven-arm octopus. Seven. Now, if you know me — and after a few episodes, I hope you're starting to — you know that eight arms is kind of our whole thing. It is the number. It is the brand. So a seven-arm octopus sounds like something went wrong, right? But here's the twist — nothing went wrong at all. Olivia: The seven-arm octopus, scientific name Haliphron atlanticus, actually has eight arms. It's just that in the males, one arm is specially modified and kept tucked away, curled up under the eye in a little sac, and it's only brought out for reproduction. So when you look at this animal, you count seven. The eighth arm is there — it's just keeping a very low profile. I find that both hilarious and brilliant. It's like carrying a secret arm in your pocket. Olivia: Now, this creature was just spotted off the coast of California — and here's what makes this so exciting — it was only the fourth time in forty years that anyone has documented one in those waters. Four times. In four decades. This is not a shy animal, exactly, it's just an incredibly rare sighting. These octopuses can grow absolutely enormous — we're talking bodies the size of a person's torso, with arms that can stretch several feet. They live in the open ocean, not on the seafloor like a lot of their cousins, drifting through the deep blue in what's called the pelagic zone. And because they live out there in the vast open water, far from anywhere researchers regularly patrol, encounters like this are genuinely extraordinary. Olivia: The sighting was captured on video by researchers, and you can feel the excitement in the footage — this massive, ghostly, seven-armed shape moving through the water with that slow, otherworldly grace that only a very large cephalopod can pull off. Scientists were thrilled. Because every sighting adds a piece to the puzzle. Where do these animals range? How deep do they go? What are they eating out there? We still have so many questions, and each rare encounter is a gift. Olivia: And speaking of rare and extraordinary — let me tell you about what's happening at the bottom of the ocean, literally at the bottom, near hydrothermal springs in the abyss. Now, hydrothermal vents are these places on the ocean floor where water heated by volcanic activity seeps up through cracks in the earth. The water can be warm — not boiling, but noticeably warmer than the surrounding deep sea, which is otherwise absolutely frigid. And scientists have recently published research in the journal Science showing that octopuses have figured this out. They are using these warm springs as nurseries. Olivia: We've actually known for a little while that octopuses gather at hydrothermal areas to brood — the famous Octopus Garden off the coast of California near Davidson Seamount was a huge discovery a few years back. Thousands of pearl octopuses — Muusoctopus robustus — were found there, females carefully tending their eggs in the warm water seeping up from below. And the warmth matters enormously, because temperature controls how fast embryos develop. Warmer water means faster development, which means eggs spend less time exposed to predators and the dangers of the deep. Olivia: This new research expands what we know about that behavior and looks at abyssal hydrothermal springs — these are even deeper, more hidden, more cryptic environments — and finds that octopuses are using them too as incubators for their broods. Think about what that means. A mother octopus, in one of the darkest, most remote places on Earth, has somehow found the warm spot. She has located a patch of gently heated water in a vast cold ocean and she is using it, deliberately, to give her eggs the best possible chance at life. That is not random. That is a mother making a choice. And I find that absolutely breathtaking. Olivia: And then — because the ocean apparently decided this episode needed a third act of new species energy — researchers have also just described a tiny, beautiful, previously unknown octopus discovered in the deep waters of the Galápagos. Tiny and blue, spotted during an underwater survey using a remotely operated vehicle, or ROV. The footage shows this little creature — and I mean little, we're talking small enough to fit in your hand — glowing with this soft, ethereal blue color against the dark water. Scientists think it may represent a species new to science, though formal classification is ongoing. Olivia: The Galápagos, of course, is one of those places the world already knows for extraordinary biodiversity — Darwin's finches, giant tortoises, marine iguanas. But the deep waters around those islands are still largely unexplored, and every dive with an ROV seems to turn up something that makes the scientists on the ship absolutely lose their minds with excitement. This little blue octopus is a reminder that even in places we think we know, the ocean is still keeping secrets. Wonderful, tiny, blue secrets. Olivia: Alright, thread two — Octopus and Humans — and this is always my favorite part, because this is where it gets personal. I want to talk today about a story that's a little different from a single encounter. It's more of a scientific relationship — a long, careful, patient kind of knowing — between researchers and a community of octopuses at that same Octopus Garden I mentioned. Olivia: When MBARI — the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute — first sent their ROVs down to Davidson Seamount and found thousands of pearl octopuses gathered there, it wasn't just a wow-look-at-that moment. The researchers kept coming back. They documented individual females over time. They tracked how long the brooding period lasted. They noted which animals were in which spots, how the eggs developed, whether the warmer water really did speed things up. And here's what they found — yes, it did. Eggs in the warmer areas near the thermal seeps hatched significantly faster than they would in cold water. We're talking about a brooding period that in cold deep water could last over a decade — yes, a decade — being potentially cut down dramatically by the warmth. Olivia: Now, imagine being a researcher and piecing that together. You're watching animals that you cannot interact with directly — they're hundreds of meters down, you're on a ship, your eyes are a camera on a robot arm. And yet through patience, and technology, and genuine scientific love for these animals, a real relationship forms. Not a relationship like a pet and an owner, but a relationship like a scientist and a subject that has slowly, slowly revealed its secrets. That kind of patient watching, that sustained attention — that is a form of connection too. Olivia: And on a more immediately heartwarming note, I want to mention something that touches on the NOAA fisheries research — because it connects to how humans and octopuses coexist, and it matters. A new study has found that octopuses, as a group, are remarkably resilient animals. Their populations can bounce back from pressure faster than many other seafood species. Their lifespans are short — most octopuses live only one to three years — and they reproduce prolifically. A single female can lay thousands of eggs. And that combination means that if conditions are right, octopus populations can recover relatively quickly. Olivia: This is actually significant news for fisheries management, because it suggests that certain octopus fisheries can potentially remain open longer without causing lasting damage to populations — if they're managed responsibly, if the data is good, if the monitoring is careful. Now, that doesn't mean we should be careless. But it does mean that the relationship between octopus populations and human fishing communities — fishing communities around the world who depend on octopuses for their livelihoods — might have a bit more flexibility than previously thought. Octopuses, it turns out, are survivors. Which honestly — given everything we know about how clever and adaptable they are — should not surprise any of us one bit. Olivia: There's also something deeply moving about the fact that human communities in places like West Africa, the Mediterranean, parts of Asia and the Pacific have fished octopuses sustainably for generations. There's traditional knowledge there — about seasons, about where octopuses gather, about how to give populations space to recover — that modern science is now starting to validate. That's a beautiful conversation, when old knowledge and new research shake hands. I love when that happens. Olivia: Now let's get into our third thread — Understanding Octopuses — because science isn't just discovering new species, it's learning to read the ones we already know. And right now, some of the most exciting work happening in octopus research is about figuring out what is actually going on inside that distributed, alien, magnificent brain. Olivia: Here's the thing about octopus intelligence that blows people's minds every single time — two-thirds of an octopus's neurons are not in its central brain. They're in its arms. Each arm has its own mini-nervous system and can act semi-independently. If you ask an octopus to reach into a hole and feel around for food, the arm kind of figures that out on its own. The central brain says "go look in the hole" and the arm handles the details. That is so fundamentally different from how human intelligence works that we genuinely don't have great frameworks for understanding it yet. Olivia: And this is where A I is starting to play a really fascinating role. Researchers have been using machine learning tools to analyze octopus behavior in ways that human observers simply can't. Video footage from aquarium tanks and field studies gets fed into A I systems that can track body patterns — the ripples and pulses of color and texture across an octopus's skin — and start to decode them. Because octopuses communicate through their skin. The chromatophores — tiny, pigment-containing cells — can fire in sequences and patterns that researchers are increasingly convinced carry meaning. Olivia: There's work being done through the Cephalopod Page and various university labs to try to catalog these patterns. What skin states correlate with what behaviors? Does a particular ripple pattern appear consistently when an octopus is startled? Does a different pattern appear during feeding? During sleep — because yes, octopuses do seem to sleep, and they may even dream, their skin flickering through color changes during what looks like REM sleep. A I is helping researchers spot patterns in that flickering that human eyes would simply miss. Olivia: Now I want to circle back to our cute new species from the Galápagos, because this tiny blue octopus actually connects beautifully to this thread. When a new species is discovered, it's not just a taxonomy moment — it's a window. Scientists get to ask, from the very beginning: what does this animal do? How does it behave? What does its skin do? Does it show the same kinds of color patterns we see in other shallow-water octopuses, or does deep-sea life demand different strategies? Every new species is a new data point in the larger project of understanding what octopus intelligence and communication actually looks like across the family tree. Olivia: And the seven-arm octopus plays into this too, actually. Because Haliphron atlanticus lives in open water, it doesn't hide in dens, it doesn't sit on a rocky reef and change color to match the substrate the way a common octopus might. It uses different strategies — it has been observed sheltering inside the bells of jellyfishes, which is both terrifying and genius. What does communication look like for an open-ocean octopus? How does it use its skin in an environment that's just blue in every direction? These are questions we barely know how to ask yet, let alone answer. But researchers are asking them. And A I tools are increasingly part of how they'll find answers. Olivia: There's a project called Project CETI — which stands for Cetacean Translation Initiative — that's working on using machine learning to decode sperm whale communication, and people are starting to ask whether similar approaches could work for octopuses. Could we build a large enough dataset of octopus skin patterns, octopus behaviors, octopus contexts, and teach an A I model to find the signal in the noise? Could we ever get to a place where we understand what an octopus is expressing? I don't think anyone is promising that we'll be having conversations with octopuses next Tuesday. But the fact that serious scientists are asking these questions, and that the tools to pursue them are becoming available — that is genuinely thrilling. That is the future reaching back to tap us on the shoulder. Olivia: And here is what I love most about all of this — all of it, the seven-arm mystery, the nurseries in the deep, the tiny blue newcomer, the resilient survivors, the flickering dreaming skin — all of it is pointing in the same direction. These animals are more than we thought. They always have been. And we are finally, slowly, building the capacity to appreciate just how extraordinary they are. Every dive, every ROV deployment, every algorithm trained on octopus footage is a step toward understanding creatures that experience this world in a way so different from ours that it genuinely expands what we think consciousness and intelligence can look like. Olivia: That is where I want to leave you today — with that feeling of expansion. Because that is what octopuses do to me, every single time. They make the world bigger. Olivia: What a day on the ocean, friends. We've met a seven-armed wonder drifting through open California waters, visited mothers tending eggs in the warm deep dark, found a tiny blue newcomer in the Galápagos, learned that octopuses are survivors who give fishing communities hope, and followed the thread of A I research that may one day help us understand what octopuses are actually saying with their extraordinary, expressive, electric skin. I love this job so much. You can find links to all the stories and studies we talked about today in the show notes — just check the link in show notes and you'll find everything. This has been Ollie the Octopus, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor — thank you to all three for making this show possible. If today's episode made you wonder, made you smile, or made you want to go watch octopus footage for the next three hours — I completely understand and I fully support that decision. Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, share the show with someone who needs a little ocean magic in their week, and stay curious out there. Until next time — keep your eight arms busy, your colors bright, and never stop exploring.