They found the “octopus garden,” home to at least 6,000 nesting Muusoctopus robustus — commonly known as pearl octopuses. The researchers estimate there could be 20,000 across the entire seamount.
About 80 miles from the coast of central California, thousands of octopuses gather on rocks two miles below the surface of the ocean. This location, dubbed “octopus garden,” is the largest known aggregation of these mollusks in the world, though it doesn’t attract much else of equal size. Scientists have been puzzled why so many octopuses plant themselves in these abysmal, colder waters — until now.
“We said, ‘Don’t waste your time going there,'” said Jim Barry, senior scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and lead author of the new study. “We’ve been all over it, you’re not going to discover anything that we haven’t already discovered, or very likely not.”Nevertheless, Barry and his colleagues said there is an unexplored area on the foothills of the seamount that could be interesting to investigate. In 2018, researchers sent a ship to study the area.
The team reasoned that the warmer water helps accelerate the development of the embryo, speeding up the metabolic processes. Typically at near-freezing temperatures in the deep ocean, researchers expected pearl octopus eggs at least five years to hatch. These hatched in just two years. “The deeper you go, the less food there is … it has already been chewed up by the animals that live in the water column, including microbes, fish, whateversaid Barry. The octopus carcasses are important because they “become part of the food web” at lower depths.
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