Mysterious octagons stamped across the seabed of the Fram Strait between Greenland and Svalbard had scientists scratching their head word . Some were mini while others were gravid than a basketball , but what was have them ? Remote - operated fomite ( ROV ) were able-bodied to get to the bottom of the peculiar prints , attain that they look to be the looker marks of Dumbo devilfish feeding issue .
At a astonishing 1,000 to 4,000 ( 3,280 to 13,100 feet ) meter mysterious , the bathypelagic zone is one of the largest and least explored biome on the satellite , with the expectant animals being the most difficult to study . This is because unlikely microscopic animals , they ca n’t be caught and transported for study without being damaged beyond designation ( did you know theblobfish does n’t actually look like that ? ) . Deep - ocean dwelling animal stay a flake of a mystery and for soft - embodied brute like cephalopod mollusks – an abundant and diverse grouping in the deep sea – we rely onchance encounters while piloting ROVsto see what they ’re up to .
The Cirrata chemical group of octopus arefound in the deep watersof all of Earth ’s sea , sometimes call the “ Dumbo devilfish ” for the copulate fins that calculate like gargantuan ears . They ’re retrieve to feed mostly on insect and crustaceans , but until late all we had to go on were observation of a single female person ofOpisthoteuthis sp.that was keep in an fish tank for 53 days .
It’s hard to imagine where perfect octagons might come from until you see how Dumbo octopuses feed.A Golikov et al, Proceedings Of The Royal Society B © 2023CC BY 4.0
abstruse - ocean surveys tow ROVs in the Arctic revealed the presence of manyCirroteuthis muellerithat were found drifting in the urine pillar at 500–2,600 m ( 1,640–8,530 foot ) from the seafloor . The cameras also reveal thatC. muelleriwas eat on the seafloor , marking the first fourth dimension a oceanic – benthic feeding migration has been name in cephalopods . It ’s a alimentation strategy more ordinarily seen in deep - sea gelatinous fishes and holothurian .
As well as answer questions about deep - sea cephalopod feeding , the observations also answered a grown question : What ’s with all the octagon ?
“ During the OFOBS deployments in the high Arctic , 106 regular octagonal pattern were observed on the seafloor in 92 of the 5,100 collected persona , ” spell the study authors . “ These patterns often contained indentations from the octopod arms onto the seafloor . These traces vary in diameter from 4 to 47 atomic number 96 , though the great legal age were close to the average diameter of 22 centimeter ( 8.6 inches ) , matching the sizing of the octopods . ”
The migratory feeding formula that seesC. muelleristamping octagons across the sludgy Davy Jones like a potato stamp that ’s gone nomadic represents an example of convergent evolution in recondite - sea megafauna , advise the study authors , facilitating the perpendicular transfer of carbon in the water pillar .
“ The main ecologic reasons are likely to avoid the threat from predator and to economize energy by using passive exile with ocean currents , ” they conclude . “ These large - scale ( over 2.5 km [ 1.6 statute mile ] ) vertical movements of megafauna should be considered in preservation scheme , and illustrate how deep - sea environments are ecologically connected . ”
The study is print inProceedings Of The Royal Society B.
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