We are diving today on the Corner Rise One Seamount. This
is actually an unnamed little seamount. This area has
obviously persisted over time. Oh, we have a little octopus.
Dumbo. Mike Vecchione from the National Museum of Natural
History at the Smithsonian Institution has identified this
Dumbo octopi as a Cirrothauma magna. It's actually quite a
rare species.
Um beautiful detail on his tentacles there. It's just so
wonderfully graceful when they swim. They move with these dumbo
ears. Beautiful. Very red and transparent. A lot of organisms
in the deep ocean are often red uh particularly if you're a
mobile fauna, red is a attenuated very high up in the
water column so as you go deeper and deeper you no longer
can see red colors and so if you make yourself a red color,
you're very often uh invisible.
And transparency is also a really good strategy to live in
the deep ocean. If you're transparent, it's a very hard
for other organisms to see you. So this combination of a bit of
transparency and a bit of red probably keeps this uh this
octopi very hidden from predators.