Octopuses

They’re like aliens from another planet. There are over 300 species and counting, from the size of your fingernail to 10 metres across. They live on the ocean’s surface, and in its darkest depths. But how intelligent are they, really? How do they use tools? And what’s it like to meet one in the wild? Eminent marine biologist and science communicator Helen Scales joins Hannah in the studio.

We’ll also meet Gretchen Früh-Green, one of the scientists who discovered the Lost City, who some believe could be the origin of all life on Earth.

Helen Scales (Intro):
Missing an octopus is, it’s one of those things you really hope might happen every time you go in the ocean. And then when it finally does happen, you have to pinch yourself.

I was snorkelling off the coast of Mauritius, little islands in the Indian Ocean. I would stop in one place and have a bit of a better look around and see if there’s anything there that I might not have first seen. And, and that was the moment when I noticed that something was watching me, a pair of eyes was down there on the reef a couple of a metre or so below me. And at first, I saw its eye – this big open eye was looking at me peering through the corals, it was really blended in with the corals and multiple colours like and you can see that its skin was textured, raised in bumps it was doing its best to look like a coral weedy covered rock. But once you’ve seen an octopus, you know things are different, I think. I can tell you all the stories I want about what it’s like to see an animal that’s really watching you back, and it has this strange something going on behind its eyes. But once you see that, you’ll understand what I mean.

Hannah Stitfall:
This is Oceans: Life Under Water, a podcast series all about the oceans and the mind blowing life within them. I’m Hannah Stitfall. I’m a zoologist, wildlife filmmaker and broadcaster. And I’m on a mission to learn everything I can about our five oceans. Today’s episode: octopuses

Helen Scales:
We have to remember what they are. I mean, these are invertebrates – their closest relatives are slugs and clams. And yet amongst all of these fairly simple animals with a fairly limited number of nerves in their bodies, there’s the octopuses.

Hannah Stitfall:
Did you know there are around 300 different kinds of octopus and that they date back to before the dinosaurs.

Helen Scales:
For me the octopuses are this like weird little thing that just happened. We’re still trying to figure out why and how

Hannah Stitfall:
This is Oceans: Life Under Water, Episode Seven.

So today, guys, I’m really excited to have Helen Scales back as my guest for today’s episode. Now Helen is a marine biologist, author and broadcaster. And she loves diving with these incredible bizarre creatures. Welcome back, Helen!

Helen Scales:
Hello. Lovely to be back. Thanks for having me.

Hannah Stitfall:
So we’re here today to talk all about octopuses. So we’re going to delve into the shape shifting three hearts, blue blood, all of that. And you are a top fan. I mean, I can see this t-shirt. I mean, we’ve got to talk about it.

Helen Scales:
Isn’t it awesome?! Yeah, I am a bit of a bit of a fan of octopuses, as you can see. With my beautiful… this is an Argonaut and perhaps we’ll come back to them. They are really, I mean, in my view, one of the best octopuses, but there are so many to choose from, it’s hard but yeah, it’s they’re pretty cool. There’s a lot of love for the tentacles. Well, their arms, the suckers and the you know, you’re like a bit of a giant squid Cthulhu moment. But something about keflapod that people find irresistible.

Hannah Stitfall:
I just love that you’ve come on brand. I think it’s great!

So how many different types of octopus do we have? I was reading we’ve got about? Is it between seven and 800 cephalopods? How many?

Helen Scales:
Yeah, I think there’s about 300 species that we found so far. But more all the time, like just a couple of weeks ago, there was announcement that some deep sea researchers off the coast of Costa Rica have found maybe four new species.

Hannah Stitfall:
Oh, wow.

Helen Scales:
So you know, we are finding more. But yeah, kind of around about 300.

Hannah Stitfall:
And tell us about their skin which is is like no other.

Helen Scales:
It is amazing. And you really don’t know, if you see an octopus, whether it’s an aquarium or in the wild, you instantly get that sense that it has got this incredible colour changing and also texture. So you know it can, they have chromatophores on their skin, which these amazing structures that basically are little blobs of pigment that can either squeeze closed so you don’t see them or they can open right up and you can see that it’s like kind of pixel basically if it was changing size, and they’re all different colours and they’re all controlled by nerves. So they’re basically, the colours on the skin of an octopus have like this direct connection to their nervous systems, so their brains and their control intricately controlling second by second the colour that their skin is.

And then yeah, little muscles also can make them look bumpy like moss or seaweed. I mean, the first time I saw an octopus, all I saw was an arm kind of whisk past me it was in the middle of all the seaweed. So it was much more kind of gardeny, the seaweed but of that site, and I just saw these suckers go past and I was like, octopus! And if I hadn’t seen that I would not and the only reason I then notice where it was sitting was because I’d seen it the suckers kind of sweep past because it was so well camouflaged. You know, you read about it. And I know that octopus is used their colours for camouflage. But when you see it, it’s like, yeah.

Hannah Stitfall:
And it is, it’s in a split second.

Helen Scales:
Yeah, they can then, you know, they absolutely I mean, you have seen incredible footage of octopuses. It’s very similar thing like an octopus, basically pretending to be a bit of seaweed sitting on a bit of corals weedy coral and being like, Nope, I’m not here. And then the diver with the camera coming a bit closer and it’s suddenly just erupts and turns white, instantly white. But yeah, this is the white thing is that kind of startled response. They basically trying to get you to be shocked. And it was quite shocking when I saw it. So you can imagine if it was a predator, they might be like, Oh, okay, I’ll leave you alone. And it gives them a second to then swim off and escape. So they use the colours for camouflage. But yes, scaring predators. And they probably, I think, are communicating with it too. And you know, there’s things going on between octopuses and they’re using… We certainly know for other cephalopods, things like their a squid, we think have kind of different patterns, that mean different things that we’re trying to sort of slowly understand that they’re communicating with each other through through their colours and patterns on their bodies, because they don’t make any noises. So this is like that one way they can actually communicate.

Hannah Stitfall:
So how, I mean, we know we know that they’re intelligent, but how intelligent? Are they really, I mean, all of these, their decision making all of the time really, I mean, these are all decisions to change their colours.

Helen Scales:
Yeah, absolutely. And like one of the coolest species I think for that is the mimic octopus, which is what I would love to see, I have never seen a mimic octopus, they live in Indonesia. And they basically do impersonations of other animals, but a whole bunch of different other animals, not just they don’t just mimic one thing, but they can make decisions about, okay, I’m going to be a flat fish and they wrap their arms around and make themselves all flat and swim across the seabed, like a flat fish does. Or I’m going to be a sea snake. And they put six of their arms down a hole and have two of them out and make them black and white and stripy, like a sea snake. And then they use the bots, they’re the tip of their arm, they sniff around as if it was the head of a sea snake. Amazing!

Hannah Stitfall:
Wow!

Helen Scales:
And then lots of other, it can be liquid be lion fish, there can be a bunch of other kind of dangerous animals. And they’re basically trying, I think, to persuade a predator to leave them alone. Like they’re like, No, no, I’m not a soft, delicious octopus. I’m a very dangerous, poisonous lion fish or whatever. But yeah, they’re making those decisions mid, second by second in terms of how they behave. So it’s things like that, that give us a sense, octopuses clearly do have have a lot going on in terms of their cognitive abilities.

We have to remember what they are. I mean, these are invertebrates. These are animals that their closest relatives sure are things like squid and cuttlefish, but within the mollusks, they’re you know, slugs, and clams, and mussels, and snails, you know things that we really wouldn’t look at and go, Okay, that’s a very intelligent, problem solving complex creature, they’re very different. And yet, amongst all of these fairly simple animals with a fairly limited number of nerves in their bodies, there’s the octopuses! Suddenly, out of all of the, suddenly they appear on this incredibly distant part of the animal kingdom, if you’d like, the animal, you know, family tree, to us, vertebrates, they’re doing it all by themselves. And that raises so many interesting questions.

But it also makes it really difficult to understand how intelligent they are and how to test them because they’re so different to us. Their whole bodies are made in completely different ways, their nervous systems. So fine, okay, humans have about 100 billion nerve cells, you know, we are very brainy thing, creatures. And we’re used to having all of that the idea of having that most of those nerves in our brains, right, octopuses have got 500 million nerve cells, but half of that is in their arms. And half of that is in what’s the equivalent of a brain for them, which is the sort of not of yeah, kind of concentration of them in their heads. But half of their nervous systems are in their arms, which is completely different to the way we operate as vertebrates. So, you know, they’ve evolved intelligence entirely separately to us. And they do it in a very different way. So testing and understanding that it’s really hard. But there are clues. I think anyone who spent any time with an octopus, studying them just has this sense that there’s something different about them, and they do, they behave in really curious ways. They’re very curious creatures, brilliant at solving problems – and they remember the solutions that you know they can do things like…

Hannah Stitfall:
Yeah, haven’t they? They’ve been found to use tools Haven’t they?

Helen Scales:
Yeah, absolutely. One of my favourites of that is the coconut carrying octopus. Have you seen the video? If you haven’t just check it out it’s wonderful. It’s an octopus that basically find two empty halves of a coconut they’ve been cut in half by a human like this is a coconut that’s been neatly cut down the middle to take out the meat inside is found them at the bottom of the sea pick them together worked out and they go together. These are two parts of…

Hannah Stitfall:
Oh, yes, I have seen this.

Helen Scales:
It’s really cool! Well, he picked basically finds one half picks it up and uses its arms as legs, because octopuses can actually sort of walk across the seabed if they want to. So it does that, picks up this one half coconut and finds another half and goes oh not gonna go together and carries it around and uses it and hides inside, it’s like a little mobile shelter. But basically what it means, it more than it’s kind of just a cool video, it’s showing us that they use tools and they also have like a plan like they are they realised that my might not need this coconut now. But if I carry it with me, there’s gonna come a point where I need to hide because something’s gonna come and try and eat me. So I’ll I’ll carry it along with me and I’ll then I’ll climb inside and close it down. So they are smart. They are, really smart!

Hannah Stitfall:
And how did they evolve? Um, and I was reading that fossilised remains date back to pre-dinosaurs.

Helen Scales:
Yeah, I think we know that the group, so the coleo, the coleoids. I think it’s how you say it. So the group that includes cuttlefish and squid, within the cephalopods, dates to around somewhere between 160 and 100 million years ago. I mean, the cephalopods themselves go way back into the Cambrian. Like we’ve got really weird ancestors of octopuses when they still had shells, because most of octopuses don’t. Yeah, sort of 500 million years ago, but then they kind of it was a bit more recently that they branched off to the what we now have as the modern cuttlefish, octopuses and squid. So yeah, they’ve been around in the ocean has had cephalopods for a long time and they’ve done lots of really cool things in their evolution. I think for me, the octopus is our this is like weird little thing that just happened. When all of the rest of life that’s evolved, like there they are. And we were still trying to figure out why and how.

Hannah Stitfall:
And what would you say is your favourite species if you if you had to pick one.

Helen Scales:
Tough, again. Really tough for me because there’s everything to go from, like the blooming octopus with their amazing poisons. Gosh, I mean, incredible things. To blanket octopuses which float through the open ocean, they’re one of the few that live not on the bottom of the sea. Most octopuses do live on the seabed, but these ones swim around, and they tear off the arms of jellyfish and use them as weapons. So again, like tool use in them, they carry them around, like I got a stinger here, like I’m gonna use it possibly to catch their own food.

But if you push me to just choose one, it would be the Argonauts. They are really awesome. The ones that are on my beautiful t-shirt, so you have to check that out. And the person who drew the beautiful picture is a good friend of mine. They are the only octopuses that make shells. And they’ve come back to shell making so you know, the ancestors of octopuses, and were other mollusks that lived inside a hard shell that covered up their whole bodies. And then basically, in that kind of 160 million years ago, things were changing in the ocean. And there were a lot more big predators around, life was becoming very dangerous. And different, different groups of animals responded and evolved in different ways. Because there were things like ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs and great big giant marine reptiles just terrorising the oceans. Some animals built bigger, thicker shells to protect themselves. But the ancestors of octopuses lost their shells and basically became very nimble and quick to escape from predators.

But the Argonauts have kind of come back to shell making and they do it in a completely different way they use – you might just to be able to make our my t-shirt – there’s like two weird kind of ends to two of their arms which look like webs. They’re like silvery webs. That’s what’s actually red in this picture. And it’s the the adapted ends of two arms, which they make the shell with. It’s like a kind of shell making kind of Yeah, like a web. And it’s the females that do this, so it’s only the females that do this.

And we know all of this thanks to the incredible scientist from the 19th century, a lady from France called Jeanne Villepreux-Power. And she wanted to figure out this the truth about organoids, people would have found their shells, washed up on beaches, and they’d occasionally seen these little octopuses inside them. And a lot of scientists assumed that they were parasitising, they’d stolen the shells from someone else. Because, you know, octopuses don’t make sure that’s what we at that, you know, thought. So they, you know, they, they were like, Ha, these are, you know, shell stealing creatures. And we know, that’s the story. But she basically started doing studies on them. You know, she knew she worked out that Yes, these animals can come all the way out of their shells. So not, if you tried to take a snail out of its shell, it’s bad news for the snail. Like that’s it.

Hannah Stitfall:
Game over again.

Helen Scales:
They’re stuck inside their shells. But an argonaut can come all the way out she the they just make them and hold on to them with their suckers on their arms, their eight arms, she would leave little bits of broken shell on the bottom of these aquarium tanks. And they would sort through them and find a bit that match the hole in the shell and like glue it back on. So they could fix these shells, though clearly weren’t just stealing them from someone else.

Argonauts is one of those species we get quite a bit in the deep sea where there’s a big difference between the males and the females, like angler fish. So male argonauts are teeny, teeny tiny compared to the females, and they have one specialised arm, as most octopuses do, which delivers the sperm. And scientists used to think that this was a worm, they thought it was a parasitic worm. But in fact, it was the it’s the the male arm that gets dropped, and the females collect them. And she puts them inside her shell. And then the male has done his bit and he goes and dies. As many organisms do, they don’t live very long. And she can carry around several of these sperm leaden arms in her shell and use them when she wants to fertilise her eggs. Then the shell is like a mobile brood chamber to carry around with her and rear her eggs in and that’s what that’s for. So she deliberately makes it and definitely doesn’t steal it from someone else. And they’re beautiful things that little octopus this silvery and small, really delicate. And just to imagine that it was made by this little octopus. It’s just really cool.

Hannah Stitfall:
Well, you’ve sold them to me. That’s it. Argonauts all the way!

Helen Scales:
They are really lovely. It’s a few different species. And they live in the open high seas. So you know, it’s it’s really hard to see these things, really mysterious.

Hannah Stitfall:
So that makes the counter even even more special. Wouldn’t it be great to be an octopus for a day, just to have those eight arms? Oh my gosh, feel what they feel. And to be able to change colour and morph into… Great!

Helen Scales:
Completely different way of being a, yeah just a sort of intelligent, sensitive creature in a completely different way to us. Oh yeah. 100% I would take octopus, yes please.

Hannah Stitfall:
So guys, we’re just taking a quick break. But if you could please, please help us and spread the word about oceans pod by hitting the Follow button. And come join the conversation on our socials as well. @oceanspod. Now we’re on TikTok, Instagram and X/Twitter. There’s some really cool video content on there. So come and join us.

Hannah Stitfall:
How sociable are they? Do they form communities?

Helen Scales:
Yeah, so that’s a really interesting thing, actually. And there’s some really fascinating studies coming out of Australia on this at the moment.

So up until not too long ago we, basically marine biologists generally agreed that octopuses are not very sociable creatures, they are generally fairly asocial, fairly anti-social towards each other. You know, people tell me if you try to keep them in captivity together, they generally just have fights and eat each other. That they really they’re quite cannibalistic. Yeah, so they’re not they don’t get on well. Most species mate at a distance. I mean, I’ve told you about the argonaut dropping its arm. I mean, that’s kind of taking things to an extreme like, Here you go dear. Here’s what you need. I’m out of here.

Hannah Stitfall:
Here’s the goods, bye-bye.

Helen Scales:
Most of them don’t necessarily fall off but the male will reach from a distance because also you just doesn’t want to get too close to her. He will like reach an arm out and be like, Here you go, thanks. As a couple that do properly meet face to face, but that’s a bit more unusual. So octopuses are generally not particularly friendly towards each other. And then, a few years ago, some divers in Australia in Jervis Bay noticed an area, quite a small area of seabed covered in scallop shells, where there was about 15 octopuses or living in a fairly small area together. And then they found a second site with a similar kind of thing going on and they called one of them Octopolis and the other one Octlantis, so one like, and I think as far as I know, they’re really rare to find a site like that with octopus kind of living together.

The theory is, they don’t really know for sure. We think what’s going on in that particular site is that it’s all about the scallops basically. So octopuses being soft bodied and quite vulnerable to predation basically have to hide as much as they can, the ones that live on the seabed anyway, and they build dens and they live in the seabed, and they can dig holes in, or find caves to hide in and stay away from predators. So they would basically go to the scallop beds, pick up the nice, biggest juiciest scallops, take them back to their dens then just dump them that they’re pretty untidy creatures, they just leave their waste outside their front doors. So basically, over time, as more shells were brought in to be eaten, there was more material to use as a building material and more octopuses came. So it was this kind of combination of food and shelter that seems to have brought them to basically tolerate each other in this kind of close knit community. You know, it’s a close knit group, you know, they have fights still with each other.

Hannah Stitfall:
Do they?

Helen Scales:
Yeah, that’s amazing. There’s all these different body poses and colours that seem to possibly suggest a dominance of some of them like the big bossy octopuses will stand up kind of tall and make themselves look big and dark. They make the bodies very dark. They call it the Nosferatu pose, like this big kind of vampire sort of big looming pose of these octopuses interacting with each other. So they do interact, not necessarily in a friendly way.

Why haven’t they become more social? It’s a big question. Actually, these really intelligent complex rains they have, why aren’t they using them like sperm whales do with incredible, you know, social networks that they have? Why are octopuses is so solitary? We don’t really know. We don’t really know.

Hannah Stitfall:
And what’s the deal with octopus farms? I mean, what what’s going on there their thing now?

Helen Scales:
Not yet. So many different countries. There’s research going on all around the world. looking into the possibility of this, so there are the scientific research looking at, could they be reared in large numbers? And that’s really what most people are concerned about at the moment is, is this feasible even. Could you do that? Can you do it on a commercial basis? You know, these are animals, which we’ve talked about already as being really anti-social. They don’t like being in tanks with each other. They’re carnivores as well. So the environmental impact of rearing an animal that needs to be fed other animals is something to be considered. And what do they eat? Well, they only eat live food, that kind of feeding-side practicalities, people are trying to figure out. But a company in Spain in the Canary Islands is I think, possibly the closest to making this a reality. They’ve said they want to start rearing octopuses for consumption. They’re talking about a facility that would raise a million a year…

Hannah Stitfall:
A million a year?

Helen Scales:
…in 1000 tanks. So that’s a lot in each tank.

Hannah Stitfall:
How big are these tanks?

Helen Scales:
That’s the thing. I don’t know. Yeah, well, 1000 tanks for a million a year. I mean, yes, it’s, the numbers are pretty mind blowing. And there’s a lot of pushback against this. I should say the reason people are thinking of doing this is, I imagine partly a response to feeling like wild populations are being overfished. So people do go and hunt, hunt octopuses in the wild and there is a trade and people who want to eat octopuses as I mean, you might have been on holiday perhaps in the Mediterranean somewhere in eaten eaten calamari, might well be octopus that actually isn’t squid. They won’t be from the Mediterranean, which probably isn’t from the Med. There’s not really enough left there.

I spent time actually working in really remote part of Madagascar, where there’s an octopus fishery, and most of those octopuses get sent to Europe. So people are you know, eating Malagasy octopuses without realising. I mean, whether that’s an issue environmentally in Madagascar is another question.

But basically, there is interest in eating octopuses, and interest in rearing them and making money out of them. Basically, if farming octopus has happened, it wouldn’t be to help people who basically need them for food. This is not going to food insecure countries, these farmed octopuses would be going to people who, who are paying high prices for a really high value product. So this is not about feeding the world. It’s about making money. Let’s be clear about that. If that’s that’s where the farming kind of agenda is going for octopuses.

But there is a lot of pushback from scientists, from conservationists, from animal welfare people who are just incredibly concerned about the even the possibility of doing this. But it’s a very different prospect. On the one hand, maybe keeping a few octopuses in aquarium tanks for displaying in public aquariums. And we can talk about whether that’s a good or not, if you want, but it’s a very limited number of animals and they are cared for, really very carefully by the people who, for the most part who are looking after them, and they want their animals to be happy in captivity. I’m not saying if I’m for or against that, but I mean, I think that’s a very different case to mass rearing commercially rearing animals like octopuses. The kind of numbers that we’re talking about. Animals that we still don’t understand really, how can we keep them happy, or content, or at least not depressed?

Animals, like octopuses, I’m sure absolutely vulnerable to that kind of basically just welfare issues, if they if their surroundings aren’t stimulating enough, if they aren’t given enough space, if they don’t give them the right types of food. People even think, you know, feeding an octopus at the same time each day, which is no doubt what they would do in a farm, because they will just be banging it out, you know, six o’clock every day. Even that, the octopuses need variation in their lives they need, they need to be surprised they need stimulating, and we aren’t anywhere near understanding what would be required to keep them happy during their lives, keep them content, keep them not suffering.

Because whether or not we understand their intelligence, we certainly can grasp the idea that octopuses can suffer. And then comes the big issue of how to how to kill them. If you’re going to farm all these octopuses, how are you going to end their lives? And that’s a big question, too. I’ve heard that this farm in Spain is planning to use ice baths, which is a completely untested method, basically plunging them into ice. There’s no tests at all that I know of in octopuses, there have been some tests in fish and have been shown to be a very stressful and just awful way to…

Hannah Stitfall:
It sounds like an awful way to die.

Helen Scales:
I mean, yeah, it’s not like, you know, it’s not like that story about a frog, being in a boiling pot of water and gently warming it up. And and it doesn’t realise it’s boiling alive. That’s not the phrase, but, you know, it’s not gently being cooled down. It’s been plunged into ice. And it’s just, yeah, it’s kind of unthinkable. I mean, for me, like people, I’ve talked about this a fair bit. And people have said to me, Oh, we know we farm cows. We farmed pigs are very intelligent animals. Sure. I mean, I’m a vegetarian. But that’s, that’s put that to one side. We do that. But people have also made and continue to make horrible decisions about how we look after those animals. Even though we understand those vertebrates, the mammals that are much more like us. We understand them so much more than we do octopuses, and still we treat them badly. How on earth are we going to do anything different with these octopuses? And why bring them into that arena of having to deal with them in that way. Having them in our care, when we really don’t understand what they need? It’s just for money.

Hannah Stitfall:
Yeah, I also think it is 2024 in the in the general consensus about farming practices worldwide, whether like you said, whether you’re a vegetarian, whether you’re vegan, whether whatever you choose to eat. I don’t think at this stage in the game, we should start to be farming another wild species? I mean, you know.

Helen Scales:
Absolutely. And one that’s not needed for solving hunger.

Hannah Stitfall:
Exactly.

Helen Scales:
It’s, you know, fine. A few people might make some money out of it, probably not the people who really need to be making money, and who rely on the ocean for their livelihoods. This is a new thing that doesn’t exist. We don’t need to do it.

We need to legislate against it before it happens. That’s my view anyway, is that and there’s ways to do that we’re seeing already there are some protections for octopuses being put in place. And there’s absolutely a way to put that to the point of saying, well, we don’t farm them. That’s just not do that. Yeah, we can do that.

Hannah Stitfall:
And I was going to ask you, actually, what would you say are the biggest threats that octopuses currently face?

Helen Scales:
Yeah, so I mean, one thing that’s clear, but maybe not well understood is that octopuses for the most part, live on the seabed, they live associated with the bottom of the sea, they’re benthic. So anything that damages any of those habitats that they live in, is going to have an effect on them. You know, even if a trawler isn’t directly catching an octopus, if a bottom trawler comes along and destroys an area of whatever it might be, seagrass or coral or deep reefs or seaweed meadows, that kind of thing. Obviously, that’s going to affect these animals that you need that habitat. So I think we can easily make that connection between any kind of damage to the seabed and and the octopuses that require those, those habitats.

We’re also taking this to an extreme with the current plans to potentially start deep sea mining. So it isn’t happening yet. I sure hope it isn’t happening by the time you listen to this, because things do move quickly. Hopefully not. But there are plans afoot increasingly to begin extracting rocks from very deep parts of the ocean. We’re talking several miles down where there are metal rich deposits. One particular area of interest is in the middle of the Pacific way out between Hawaii and California. It’s a huge area of what we call a nodules. So basically rocks sitting around on the seabed.

And I remember being taught about these when I was at high school in chemistry classes, because there’s a lot of different minerals inside these rocks, they look like bits of coal. But they’re made over a very long period that take millions of years to form from the water itself. And they contain lots of different metals. And when I was taught about them at school, the idea was that, Oh, it’s just mud and rocks down there. It’s nothing else. You know, maybe one day we’ll mine these things. And that was kind of what it was like a few decades ago. Now, there’s interest, much more feverish interest in bringing these rocks up, because they have metals that could be useful in things like rechargeable batteries and cars and other things as well. But the point is that there is loads more down there in these deep abyssal plains. It’s not just mud and rocks, absolutely not.

And the more scientists are looking, the more we’re finding. I mean, already, we think there’s 1000s of species undescribed species in that just in that one area of the Pacific, including octopuses! People send down these amazing autonomous robots that basically swim through the ocean and take pictures of things and then come back and show you what they seen.

And they’re coming back with lots of images of these ghostly white octopuses, they were nicknamed Casper, the octopus, they haven’t actually been named yet, because no one has gotten a specimen and actually looked at it properly. They’ve just been captured on camera. But they do, they’ve got this kind of slightly stumpy arms, very white, pale skin, little beady black eyes, sitting down on the seabed several miles from the surface in these nodule fields. And in particular, what’s happening, we’ve got images of the females, brooding their eggs on the rocks, basically getting sort of stalks of sponges that grow on to the rocks, with that next sort of, that’s the basis of that habitat. And the octopuses lay their eggs on their sponges and then look after them and hold on to them. So it’s their habitat. This is where they are raising their young they, they rely on this, these undulating flat plains covered in these incredibly important rocks, not just for the octopus, but for so much else.

So yeah, so if we started mining those areas, for the first time opening up that huge area of wilderness to this industrial process, it would have absolutely have an impact on these incredible species like like Casper, the octopus.

Hannah Stitfall:
And can you tell us about the octopus nursery?

Helen Scales:
In another part of the deep ocean, in the Pacific, but closer to the coast off the coast of California and also of Costa Rica, scientists have found a couple of places where a lot of octopuses hang out together. Again, this is not really a community, but this is octopus is using a particular part of the seabed that works for them.

So one in particular is it’s been nicknamed the octopus garden, it’s off the coast of Monterey Bay. And you might have seen it if you’ve seen the latest series of Planet Earth, I think it’s Planet Earth Three, you might have seen the octopus nursery in that. And it’s incredible! Like scientists have basically using again, these kind of deep water cameras to get an idea of the area. They think there’s 20,000 of these octopuses all hanging out together. They’re all females, they’re all rearing their eggs, they clap, they’ve they’re these are sort of grapefruit sized octopus, as they’re called the Pearl octopus, because they are sort of pearly pink in colour. And when you see them from a distance, it does just look like there’s pearls scattered over the seabed, there’s so many of them, they’re holding on to their eggs have got their arms wrapped around.

And the reason they’re all there is because warm water is percolating up through the seabed that’s on the side of a big underwater mountain. And it’s basically just a bit warmer there. It’s like kind of sort of three bears Goldilocks idea, the rest of the deep ocean is very cold, it’s you know, it’s gets down to sort of four degrees, two degrees Celsius. And these warm springs are more like 10 degrees. And it’s speeding up the development of their eggs. If they didn’t put there if they if these females weren’t in that area, they think it would take probably 10 years or longer for the eggs to hatch. 10 years!

Hannah Stitfall:
Wow.

Helen Scales:
And the females are there the whole time looking after them. That’s another incredible thing about octopuses is, another species not too far from there, we’ve seen a species of octopus was seen, not on the thermal spring, but in a different part, incubating her eggs in the same spots, without moving for four and a half years, the longest incubation breeding period of any animal.

Hannah Stitfall:
That’s commitment!

Helen Scales:
She’s just sat there, guarding her eggs from predators until they hatched. And then, you know, then she dies as well. And that’s what octopuses do, they, the females basically, rear their young. And then that’s it.

And yeah, but there’s other going back to the octopus nursery. The idea that there’s this one, well, certainly there must be multiple places. And we know there’s a few others in the Pacific and probably loads more that we haven’t found yet. But they find these parts of the deep scene that help them you know, speed things up. So they don’t have such a long wait for their young to grow. And they sit there and stay a bit warmer. And it’s only two years for their young to hatch, which is also a really long time. And it’s an incredible ecosystem. I mean, the story of octopuses is really strange that they have these complex lives in these rich nervous systems. And these, you know, they are these incredible, intelligent, extraordinary creatures. But they only live for two years, at least the ones in the shallow seas. Deep sea octopus do live longer. But two years is the average lifespan of an octopus. And that’s just weird. We don’t really know why. And they reproduce just this one time and the females look after their young, and then they die.

But what you see in this octopus nursery is that that’s all part of the ecosystem. There’s just loads of other things as well. There’s anemones, there’s fish, there’s crabs and shrimp. It’s like a little oasis. And it’s all thanks to the octopuses coming in to have their babies. And I love that we didn’t know about this until a couple of years ago, I spoke I actually spoke to the scientist who found it and just the discoveries we’re making are so mind blowing. You think we know we know the ocean, but we really don’t. And you can come across just extraordinary sites like 20,000 octopuses all sitting on the seabed quietly rearing their babies, and we didn’t know about it before. That’s really cool.

Hannah Stitfall:
Well, Helen, listen, thank you so much for coming on today. I’m a true argonaut fan now. I was an octopus fan but that’s it! I want to get one of those t-shirts.

Helen Scales:
Get a t-shirt, go and check out argonauts look for somebody who’s there. Thank you.

Hannah Stitfall:
Brilliant. Thank you.

Next week, we’re turning away from the wilderness and we’re meeting the people of the sea. It’s not just wild animals who rely on the oceans for their livelihoods. Humans do too. But if you can’t wait until then, here’s something else for you.

This episode was brought to you by Greenpeace and Crowd Network. It’s hosted by me, wildlife filmmaker and broadcaster Hannah Stitfall. It is produced by Anastasia Auffenberg, and our executive producer Steve Jones. The music we use is from our partners BMG Production Music. Archive courtesy of Greenpeace. The team at Crowd Network is Catalina Nogueira, Archie Built Cliff, George Sampson and Robert Wallace. The team at Greenpeace is James Hansen, Flora Hevesi, Alex Yallop, Janae Mayer and Alice Lloyd Hunter. Thanks for listening and see you next week. Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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