Space-age laser technology is allowing scientists to study the ocean’s most delicate species.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Researchers know next to nothing about how they actually live.
https://www-newyorker-com.cdn.amppr...edding-light-on-untouchable-sea-creatures/amp
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Researchers know next to nothing about how they actually live.
https://www-newyorker-com.cdn.amppr...edding-light-on-untouchable-sea-creatures/amp