On a rocky outcrop almost 2 miles beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean off Costa Rica, researchers have documented an active octopus nursery. It may be the third known example of a brooding site where huge numbers of the creatures cluster together.
During a three-week expedition this month, scientists on board Schmidt Ocean Institute's Falkor research ship saw hundreds of octopuses and watched their babies hatch at the soccer field-size Dorado Outcrop. Located 2,800 meters deep in the lower reaches of the so-called twilight zone, it was one of six underwater mountains surveyed by the vessel's underwater robot, ROV SuBastian.
A subsea vehicle first spotted a large group of octopuses on the Dorado Outcrop in 2013 during an expedition to understand the area's geochemistry. "I was part of the team that went to the site . We just went to that one outcrop to look for evidence of low-temperature vents and discovered that there were those octopuses, but they didn't seem to be successfully brooding," Orcutt said.
"We don't know why they are attracted to this place. Perhaps they just stumble upon it, perhaps they seek it out, maybe for the warmth, maybe for the bare rock, maybe for some reason beyond our comprehension," said octopus specialist Janet Voight, an associate curator of invertebrate zoology at Chicago's Field Museum who was part of the latest expedition. She was one of three authors of a 2018 paper analyzing the initial footage taken in 2013.
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