Social media was abuzz recently with this image of a beautiful deep-sea octopus photographed at 1,177 m depth by the crew of R/V Falkor of the Schmidt Ocean Institute, during their recent Visioning Coral Sea expedition off Australia. Michael Vecchione, Curator of Cephalopoda at the Smithsonian, identified it as a species of the genus Muusoctopus. I wrote about another species of Muusoctopus in the November 29, 2019 issue of this blog, briefly describing the "Octopus Garden." This is a large, impressive nursery of more than a thousand brooding female Muusoctopus robustus that assemble in a small area near Davidson Seamount, a part of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary off California. Read last year's post here.
@schmidtocean #VisioningCoralSea #Muusoctopus