The Challenge of Deep-Sea Taxonomy
On Feb. 27, 2016, a beam of light from the Deep Discoverer, an undersea exploration vehicle operated remotely by researchers, fell on something new: a pale octopus resting on a flat rock at the bottom of the ocean off the Hawaiian archipelago, more than two and a half miles below the ocean surface.
The octopus was alone, her arms drawn up under her body into a shape like a light bulb, an underwater Eureka moment.
“It didn’t match the descriptions of anything that I was familiar with,” says Michael Vecchione, a zoologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Smithsonian Institution, who was watching the Deep Discoverer’s live video feed from shore that day.
The animal lacked chromatophores, the pigmented cells that enable other octopuses to change color. Her skin was slack, her body appearing less muscular than the typical octopus. And she had only one row of suckers on the underside of her arms rather than the expected two. This was pretty clearly a creature new to science.
The animal’s ghostlike appearance gave rise to a charming if obvious nickname: “Casper octopus.” But seven years later the species still doesn’t have a formal scientific name.
The rules were written in another age, one of European conquest and colonialism.
Describing a new species has traditionally required a physical specimen, known as a holotype, that can be preserved in a museum and referenced in perpetuity: This is the creature we mean when we say this name. But no specimen of the Casper octopus has yet been collected, a fairly common circumstance for deep-sea creatures glimpsed on research video feeds.
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