Almost 1,800 meters below the surface of the Pacific, where the sunlight comes only as a dull memory, a camera framed something tiny moving on the seabed. A small body, short arms, a blue color so unexpected that it made those who were following the images from the ship jump. It was 2015, near Darwin Island, in the northernmost sector of the Galápagos archipelago. That small animal, filmed next to an underwater mountain, today finally has a name: Microeledone galapagensis, a new species of octopus described in the scientific journal Zootaxa.
The Galápagos, off the coast of Ecuador, are used to living with animals that seem to have come from a parallel catalog of life: marine iguanas, giant turtles, species that only exist there and which have transformed these islands into a kind of natural open-air laboratory. This time, however, the laboratory is much further down, where underwater robots, research ships and a lot of patience are needed. The Galápagos blue octopus was observed during an expedition by the E/V Nautilus, with a remotely operated vehicle, the ROV, used to explore the seabed without sending humans to prohibitive depths.
A blue ball on the backdrop
The detail that immediately struck the researchers was the disproportion. The new octopus was about the size of a golf ball, an almost tender presence in an environment that we always imagine as huge, dark, overwhelming. The ROV managed to collect one specimen and film two other very similar ones. Back on land, the scientists brought several samples collected from the depths to the Galápagos research station. Among that material, the little blue octopus stood out with a certain biological insolence: it was too particular to be archived quickly.
The specimen was then preserved and sent to Chicago for further examination. Here began the less spectacular and more delicate part of the discovery. To describe a new species of octopus you need to look at precise structures, including the mouth, beak, teeth and internal organs. This usually requires opening the sample. In this case, however, the scholars had only one confirmed specimen on their hands. Cutting it would have meant losing a precious part of a very rare animal.
So microcomputed tomography came onto the scene, an imaging technique that uses thousands of X-ray scans to build a three-dimensional model of the animal, inside and out. A kind of virtual dissection, precise enough to show the internal organs and structures of the mouth without destroying the specimen. In the case of Microeledon galapagensis, the scans provided the details needed to confirm that it was indeed a new species.
The sea that remains off the map
The name already tells part of the story: galapagensisfrom the Galápagos. The scientific description adds other elements: it is a small squat octopus, with short arms, few suckers on its arms and characteristics that have also forced researchers to review some taxonomic boundaries of the family to which it belongs. A tiny animal, therefore, capable of shifting a small piece of our classification of living things.
The interesting thing, net of the “cute blue octopus” effect that will inevitably make its rounds on social media, is right here. The depths are not an indistinct backdrop for a nocturnal documentary. They are ecosystems full of forms, adaptations, strategies, species that we often see only once, perhaps for a few minutes, thanks to a camera that passes in the right place. This little octopus lives in a world almost invisible to us, yet concrete enough to ask for better tools, protection and much less arrogance.
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