![]() King also says the crew could see shimmers in the water, indicating that hotter water was seeping out of the seamount, though the ROV was not able to get close enough to measure the temperature. So I’d say almost 99 percent were brooding.” ![]() “Out of that 1,000, we might have seen two or three octopuses that were just swimming around. Most of the octopuses were clinging to the rock in an inverted positions the animals take while protecting their eggs. “We went down the eastern flank of this small hill, and that’s when-boom-we just started seeing pockets of dozens here, dozens there, dozens everywhere,” Nautilus chief scientist Chad King tells Bittel. What they found toward the end of 35 hours of exploration was an unprecedented colony of Muusoctopus robustus, a purple-ish deep sea octopus species. However, there is a deepwater region of basaltic reef on the southeast side of the mount that had been less explored that the team decided to focus on this time around. According to Nautilus, the seamount and region around it has been mapped extensively before and the ship visited the mount 12 years ago. Even still, the summit is submerged in 4,100 feet of water making it difficult to study the deep-sea habitat. The massive structure is 26 miles long and eight miles wide. The Davidson Seamount inside the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary is essentially an underwater mountain jutting 7,480 feet off the ocean floor. Not only did their ROV capture images of a super-cute dumbo octopus, but they also found something truly spectacular: a breeding colony of 1,000 rare deep-sea octopuses. ![]() But last week, the research vessel, which streams many of its discoveries live, hit the eight-legged jackpot during an exploration of the Davidson Seamount off the coast of Monterey, California. When researchers aboard the Exploration Vessel Nautilus spot a cool squid or octopus, it can break the internet.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |