![]() briefly caught the octopus in its draft, we gasped, realizing how risky our efforts were. The broadcast team cut to a different camera angle and muted our nervous conversations, in case the scene got ugly. I cringed as the R.O.V., like a car trying to overtake on a one-lane highway, lurched forward. But we knew that the R.O.V.’s propellers could catch it in an eddy and churn it to bits. Do we leave the creature alone for a few precious minutes of passive observation, before it slips away? Or do we try to bring it back to the lab in one piece, and study its physiology as it withers in captivity? Trying to catch it with the R.O.V.’s robotic claw would be as clumsy as sewing while wearing mittens, likely to produce a stringy mess, so we decided to open a sample box and maneuver the car-size machine toward the octopus, a centimeter at a time. We were captivated but also faced with a maddening dilemma. off its primary mission-a search for methane seeps on the seafloor-to follow the octopus. (The species has eight arms, but one is often hidden.) Its almost-comical googly eye seemed to gaze back at the camera. The footage, which was streaming live on the Internet, showed a bizarre and beautiful animal: a bundle of translucent tentacles that trailed like a cape behind a bulbous, purple head. I was one of several deep-sea scientists aboard the research vessel Falkor, watching a live video feed as my colleagues joysticked a remotely operated vehicle, or R.O.V., along the seafloor. ![]() In October, 2018, against the odds, I saw a seven-arm octopus off the coast of San Diego, California. Researchers know next to nothing about how they actually live. When sea animals are too delicate to catch and keep intact, scientific accounts tend to feel as clinical and ghostly as the autopsies that they are. What remained of the creature, he added, was “sack-shaped, large and flappy.” Another turned up in a South Pacific research trawl in the early two-thousands, but the preservation process turned it into a “frozen lump,” the giant-squid expert Steve O’Shea wrote. A living seven-arm octopus was scooped up by a Norwegian fishing trawler in 1984, but “when laid on deck the body collapsed,” a local zoologist wrote at the time. So few people have seen this creature alive that researchers must study it in death-typically, as a mound of purplish flesh that washes ashore or turns up in a net. ![]() The seven-arm octopus, Haliphron atlanticus, weighs as much as a person and haunts deep, dark waters from New Zealand to Brazil and British Columbia.
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