a rift

typhlonectes:

Giant Group of Octopus Mothers Discovered in the Deep Sea 

via: The Field Museum

“When I first saw the photos, I was like ‘No, they shouldn’t be there! Not that deep and not that many of them,” says Janet Voight, associate curator of zoology at the Field Museum and an author of a new study on the octopuses published in Deep Sea Research Part I.

Nearly two miles deep in the ocean, a hundred miles off the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, scientists during two cruises a year apart used subsea vehicles to explore the Dorado Outcrop, a rocky patch of sea floor made of cooled and hardened lava from an underwater volcano. Geochemists explored the outcrop in a tiny submersible vehicle, hoping to collect samples of the warm fluids that emerge from cracks in the rocks; they didn’t count on finding dozens of octopuses huddled around the cracks.

The octopuses were an unknown species of the genus Muusoctopus—pink, dinner-plate-sized creatures with enormous eyes. Up to a hundred of them seemed to occupy every available rock in a small area. That in itself was strange—Muuscoctopus are normally loners. Stranger still was that nearly all of the octopuses seemed to be mothers, each guarding a clutch of eggs. And this nursery was situated alongside the warm fluid issuing from the cracks in the outcrop…

Read more: PhysOrg

photographs by Phil Torres and Geoff Wheat    

(via ilovecephalopods)