Author: Sarah Zielinski / Source: Science News
A geology voyage to study fluid discharge from a rocky outcrop deep below the ocean’s surface turned up something else: A population of brooding purple octopuses.
The colony is probably doomed due to the warm, low-oxygen water coming out of the rock, but those ill-fated cephalopods may be an indicator that a healthy population is hiding out nearby, a new study contends.The octopuses reside on Dorado Outcrop, some 250 kilometers off the coast of Costa Rica and 3,000 meters deep in the sea. The outcrop is essentially a buried 23-million-year-old mountain. “Fluid is discharging from this outcrop because at some other location there’s fluid flowing from the bottom of the ocean into the earth,” notes Anne Hartwell, a marine research scientist with the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Just where that fluid is entering isn’t known, nor is the path that the water takes through the earth.
But geoscientists were curious about the fluid discharge, so in 2013 they visited the site. Images captured by the remote-controlled research vehicle Jason II revealed a wealth of brooding octopuses clinging onto the side of the outcrop. “Everyone thought they were cool, but no one really did anything about it,” Hartwell says. “There were biologists on board, but they were microbiologists.”
Hartwell wasn’t on that trip, but she was on another one a year later and visited the site in the research submarine ALVIN.
“When I got to the seafloor … there was so much life,” she recalls. The octopuses weren’t even the highlight for her. “I saw sea sponges and sea stars and crabs and shrimp. And they were colorful,” she adds. “I hadn’t expected that type of macrofauna, big organisms,…The post How a deep-sea geology trip led researchers to a doomed octopus nursery appeared first on FeedBox.