Party on the seafloor! Our intrepid colleagues at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) spotted this uncommon gathering of deep sea critters living it up 6,394 feet (1949 meters) under the sea.
This perfect gradient from soft to hard tissue is seen almost nowhere else in nature, and prevents the beak from being easily torn loose without a skeleton to connect with.
This weird picture (at first, I thought the octopus had a white cream mantle!) was taken by Nick William in New Orleans:
“I was walking home around 8 p.m. last night and thought, oh no someone didn’t clean up after their dog, only to realize it was a real octopus. I didn’t want to touch that slimy thing,”.
The weird part is, he was in Dauphin St, New Orleans when this happened. And if you have a look at the map (which I did), you begin to wonder: what the heck did the octopus do on Dauphin St ???
One of our awesome volunteers brought in this submarine as enrichment for the octos, and this little sea monster has had a fantastic time sinking the ship, causing chaos, and finding food while doing so! I love the simplicity of this little vessel as a form of enrichment, and the potential it holds for more complicated activities.
