The deepest ever sighting of an octopus, by cameras on the Indian Ocean floor | Hacker News Reader

The deepest ever sighting of an octopus, by cameras on the Indian Ocean floor

bbc.com

170 pointspseudolus40 comments

There was an interesting episode of Radiolab a couple weeks ago about a group of researchers who found a deep water octopus brooding over its eggs, and how they continued to check in with it regularly. I'm not selling it well because I don't want to spoil it:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/octom...

In that this particular octopus differs from others by not standing guard until the mother dies of exhaustion? That's interesting, I thought that was one common thing among all but one species of octopus.

Huh? The podcast says exactly the opposite. The octopus was not observed to die, but she was observed to deteriorate.

> We knew we were at the right place, we could see the -- the patch on the rock. And there were all of these tattered egg cases just in the spot where she had been.

> Tattered egg cases means that the babies had been born?

> Well, the first thing we did was search. Are there babies on the rock? Are the babies still here? Or did any of them survive? Or was it some sort of apocalyptic demise at the hands of all those hungry looking crabs?

> So they’re frantically sort of searching around the rock. Searching and searching and searching. And then they begin to see little babies that are her species. And they see a little baby here ...

> And a little baby there.

> Little octopuses crawling around.

> They’d been feeding and growing, and it was pretty clear that they were hatchlings from that clutch of eggs that we had observed.

> And did you see her?

> Nope. I’m certain that she had been consumed by some scavenger.

How did "the mother definitely died after the eggs hatched" turn into "this octopus differs from others by not standing guard until the mother dies of exhaustion"?

The only difference the podcast mentions is that this octopus has a gestational period about 50 times as long as other, better-known octopuses.

I'm not sure I follow your protest. I was talking mostly about the difference between "checking in" and not leaving at all, as most mother octopuses do.

The mother octopus never left at all. It didn't move until the eggs hatched. The "checking in" was done by the scientists ("they"), on the octopus ("it"). Not by the octopus ("they"?) on the eggs ("it"... cannot be used to refer to 160 eggs).

What a perplexingly hostile way to engage with someone.

In case the opinion of a third party watching this exchange is useful, I felt that thaumasiotes's comments were reasonable and your comment above is the first to contain hostility.

Your confusion may stem from the fact that you mis-read thaumasiotes's first comment and you were on the back foot from that point forwards.

Though we see milder examples of this all the time, it's still wild to witness such an extreme case. The only way thaumasiotes's comments could be viewed as hostile is if you consider any correction to something you said to be hostile.

It appears you’re being defensive. This is the Internet. You’re an unknown person saying the opposite of the correct thing checking in on OP. Their response seems reasonable for the Internet.

The person you are replying to is not being hostile, but explaining why you are mistaken in a very polite matter.

Stupid question... do we(people of earth and the land-above) not "blind" these creatures ? The ones that do have "light sensitive eyes/appendixes" these must be INCREDIBLE sensitive to capture the very very limited light down at those depths ? Then we come with our zillion-lumens-spotlights ?

Most likely, yes.

But it might be worthwhile to blind/kill a few creatures to better understand them to be able to protect the rest.

> Do we blind them?

Yes

But even if we would blind them (either temporarily or permanently), they would remain still mostly functional or fully functional. Still able to feed, move and escape from predators with their other three or four main senses intact. I'm generalizing, of course, each species is different but this means that the animals can always choose to escape from the light, but they aren't choosing it for some reason. Petrified by fear, curious, hungry, or feeling that remaining in the light is safer than running into the obscurity after being exposed... we don't know

On the other hand both, the animals in the light and those who remain in the dark out of the light circle and will not be blinded can have a glimpse of their surroundings in a totally different "light" and access for a brief moment to a totally new understanding of this world.

Would be interesting to know what pass by that cephalopod brain when seeing the real aspect of its companion species for the first time in their life. Will be this information allow them to associate a particular stimulus with the arrival of a particular predator, and be useful in the future? maybe, maybe not.

Maybe they don’t even have a light sensor? There would be no light down there whatsoever so it would make sense to eliminate that part to conserve energy.

Not a stupid question.

And this Reddit contains multiple answers: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2n1yd4/how_is_i...

Yes, they get blind from white light.

Most probably, but at those depths they should be relying on other "sensors" to survive as there is not that much light to illuminate their surroundings anyway.

Edit: And then there's the anglerfish with its bioluminescent lure on its head: https://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/00000144-0a34-d3c...

The seas are home to such fascinating creatures ...

The New Yorker had a feature article on the expedition and Victor Vescovo, the expedition sponsor and one of the expedition's pilots [0].

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/18/thirty-six-tho...

Came here to mention this also. This was such a great article - a perceptive and engaging portrait of Victor Vescovo and his motley crew. It’s quite long but worth every minute.

Ophistoteutidae then, and most probably Grimpoteuthis. Nice photo

The fish is probably a Bassozetus

and the caridean could be Benthesicymus (or Acanthephyra?)

`But those animals that do live at depth will clearly need some special adaptations, says Dr Jamieson.

"They'd have to do something clever inside their cells. If you imagine a cell is like a balloon - it's going to want to collapse under pressure. So, it will need some smart biochemistry to make sure it retains that sphere," the scientist explained.`

I don't understand how octopi would need special cellular adaptations for living at t those depths. So long as their cells do not require air cavities (fairly certain they don't), I can't see what the issue could be. Differential pressure can cause problems, but there's no delta-p when your cells are equally incompressible solids and liquids.

I hope that I'm wrong though and that this scientist isn't as mistaken as they sound.

High hydrostatic pressure seem to affect cell morphology, possibly due to changes in protein shapes while under extreme pressure. I only did some cursory googling and found several research papers about how pressure affecting cell morphology, for example this one on epithelial cells: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3052872/

> At atmospheric pressure, cells were flat and well attached.

> Exposure of cells to pressures of 290 atm or greater caused cell rounding and retraction from the substrate.

What's the difference between the cellular makeup of this octopus/ or any deep sea animal to make it able to sustain that kind of pressure?

The article suggests this is unknown

I read the book "Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness" last year. Very interesting book about octopi. https://www.amazon.com/Other-Minds-Octopus-Origins-Conscious...

To be honest, I found that book all over the place. It was interesting, but its message could be condensed to half its length. There was a lot of musing and scattered anecdotes but not much direction. I hope a higher quality book can come out about Octopuses. It was a bit of a let down for me.

I've heard octopi are pretty smart so they must also be pretty deep.

Nah, Those are dumbo octopus. You can guess it by the animal trying to suck the metal square bar.

If you want to be sophisticated, it's "octopoda". Slightly less, "octopods". Correct, "octopuses".

Pluralization of the word "octopus" has been a long-studied topic: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/the-many-plura...

> If you want to be sophisticated, it's "octopoda".

Where'd this come from? There is no etymological or other justification for the -a ending. You would expect "octopodes".

Don’t we discover 3k to 6k new species every year? Why is this even relevant given that scope?

> The animal was spotted 7,000m down in the Java Trench - almost 2km deeper than the previous reliable recording.

We don't discover that many large animals. Also, this isn't about discovery.

What is the "bait" in that photo?

If it is another animal, that would make me feel very uncomfortable about the whole operation.

Why? Animals eating other animals is quite common. Even herbivores are known to eat other animals (horses like snacking on baby chicks).

> horses like snacking on baby chicks

    (O.O)

I feel like the whole death-life cycle is getting harder and harder to grok. When the closest you get to life and death is packaged meat in a grocery store, it's easy to forget with what ease (the inherently innocent) nature can deal out death.

Wow that's unbelievable!

https://thehorse.com/130670/carnivorous-horses/

https://youtu.be/ZnYNmGMsU18

And the cute panda bears do the same when opportunity arises. Deer and cows will gladly eat bird chickens also.

octopuses are predators.

And to find an herbivore living in that place would be a real surprise. There is not much more options apart of eating animals or animal corpses when you live at -7000m.

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