A tiny blue octopus.
It fits right in the palm of your hand.
It lives way down off the coast of the Galapagos Islands, in the deep sea where sunlight gives up the ghost. Researchers led by Chicago’s Field Museum just published a study in the journal Zootaxa, and they have finally given this little creature a proper name.
Microeledone galapagensis.
Found back in 2015.
On an expedition aboard the research vessel E/V Nautilus.
Marine biologists used a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to creep along the ocean floor near Darwin Island. This is at the northern edge of the archipelago, the tricky bits. The ROV’s camera was scanning a steep underwater slope at a crushing depth of 1,737 meters (about 5,817 feet) when the thing appeared. Vibrant blue. Unmissable against the dark.
The team did a close inspection. They recovered the one specimen and filmed two others before leaving it alone. Back on dry land, the analysis began, and the researchers hit a wall.
They couldn’t figure out which species it was.
So they sent a photo to Janet Voight, a cephalopod expert at the Field Museum.
“I right away knew it was something really special.”
Voight, the lead author on the new study, had never seen anything like it.
But here’s the snag: proving something is a new species requires dissecting the animal. A full teardown. You have to look at all the internal parts, the muscles, the beaks, the everything. They had only ever collected one. Just one. They weren’t going to chop it up. Losing a rare specimen is bad science when you have no backup.
So they did something clever.
X-ray computed tomography.
They stacked thousands of micro-scans. Built a 3D model. Both the skin on the outside and the guts on the inside. No cutting. Just pixels. The tech let them see the minute details without touching a scalpel.
- The tentacles? Squat.
- The suckers? Few and far between.
- The skin? Smooth. Almost no pigment on the back.
- The funnel organ? Unique.
That data was enough to classify Microeledone galapagensis and place it firmly among other cephalopods in the scientific record.
“Because CT imaging is non-destructive, it is especially important for type specimens like this.”
Stephanie Smith, a coauthor, points out the obvious win. People bring her these incredibly rare, stunning specimens. Now she gets to virtually open them up.
It makes you pause.
The ocean depths remain largely unknown. We have more maps of Mars than of the sea floor, basically.
These expeditions matter.
Not just for the names we give things.
But for the ecosystems themselves, vast and unexplored, needing protection we don’t quite have the vocabulary to describe yet.
“These are little octopuses living in the deep sea, hardly anybody on Earth has seen them,” Voight says.
If you took all the dry land on Earth, piled it all together, it still wouldn’t cover the Pacific Ocean.
It is that big.
There is still so much out there we have yet to look at.
