Tiny alien-like blue octopus discovered lurking off the Galapagos Islands

Tiny blue alien-like octopus discovered off Galapagos Islands

By Jeanna Bryner edited by Claire Cameron

It’s tiny. It’s blue. And this amazed scientists. A golf ball-sized octopus found in the seabed off the Galapagos Islands is an entirely new species, scientists have just announced.

In July 2015, during a 10-day expedition to the Pacific Ocean, researchers aboard the E/V Nautilus launched a robotic submarine called Hercules just off the coast of Darwin Island, part of the Galapagos archipelago. On the side of an underwater mountain, some 1,773 meters below the sea surface, they discovered a small blue octopus. In a video of the excursion, the scientists can be heard laughing and cooing at the creature: “He’s a cute little guy or something,” one team member says, followed by another, “Oh my God, that’s adorable.”

After collecting a few specimens for analysis in their laboratory at the Charles Darwin Research Station, the scientists realized they could not identify the blue cephalopod. They sent an image to Janet Voight, an octopus expert and curator emeritus of invertebrates at the Field Museum in Chicago. “I knew right away that this was something really special,” said Voight, lead author of a new paper describing the discovery published in Zootaxain a press release. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

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The team examined the octopus’ internal organs using a micro-CT scanner, which collects thousands of slices of X-ray images across an object that can then be stitched together to create a very high-resolution virtual model. Details such as the relatively few suckers on its arms, its smooth skin, the features of its beak, and the coloring around its organs and parts of the mantle indicated a new species, now called Microeledone galapagensis. Turns out this “cute little guy” also had 13 eggs in his ovaries.

“Discoveries like these remind us how much of the Galápagos ocean depths remains unexplored,” said co-author Salome Buglass, of the University of California, Los Angeles, formerly at CDF, in the same release.

The Galapagos Islands, located off the coast of Ecuador, are famous for the unique animals and plants that live there. They are also home to Darwin’s finches, which Charles Darwin discovered during his famous survey of the area in the 1830s aboard the HMS Beagle.

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