New Species Of Tiny Blue Octopus Discovered In Galápagos Islands

A tiny blue octopus that lives in the deep sea off the coast of the Galápagos Islands is so small that it can fit in the palm of a hand. And as a team of researchers coordinated by Chicago's Field Museum announced in a new study just published in the journal Zootaxa, it now has an official name—Microeledone galapagensis. The octopus was first spotted in 2015 during a deep-sea expedition aboard the research vessel E/V Nautilus. From there, marine biologists used a remotely operated underwater vehicle (RoV) to explore the ocean floor near Darwin Island, at the northern end of the Galápagos archipelago. As the RoV's camera moved across the seafloor near an underwater slope at a depth of 1,773 meters (5,817 feet), they noticed the tiny octopus with its vibrant blue coloring. “These are little octopuses that live in the deep sea, and hardly anybody on Earth has ever gotten to see them. I just feel lucky that I got to work with them,” says Field Museum expert Janet Voight, who helped identify the octopus as a new species. “If you took all the land on Earth and pieced it together, you would not cover the Pacific Ocean. The oceans are so big, and there’s so much left to explore.”