Imagine you’re a marine biologist who’s sent your robot exploring 2.6 miles down to the ocean floor off Hawaii. On the feed, you watch the vehicle’s lights sweep the ocean floor. It’s just brown and grey, rocks and sediment … until a little white ghost swings into view. It’s perched on a little rock mesa, and it seems to be … waving?
You zoom your robot in for a closer look. The ghost turns out to be a squat, bright-white octopus, waggling its tentacles at the robot. But (as one of the real scientists put it in this video) you’ve “never, ever seen one like that before.” This octopus is not in the book.
The scientists who first spotted Casper in 2016 went through archival footage and found another eleven ghost octopi. Those dozen turn out to represent not one but two new-to-people octopus species. Neither has been named yet, because no specimen has been caught. And Field Museum zoologist Janet Voight explains here, “[i]t could be that they’re fairly common.” That’s how little we know about Casper’s depths.
Aquariums do not suit most super deep-sea creatures. But Aquatica stocks shallow-water species from the Hawaiian archipelago, the indies, and all over the oceans. We receive new saltwater fish every Wednesday and freshwater fish every Thursday.