2023-08-25 14:40:00
A team of scientists has discovered why more than 20,000 pearl octopuses gather on the same rock. The name is due to the fact that they look like precious stones from a distance.
According to experts, these animals are looking for the warm water that runs down the bottom of the sea. In this way, they use the rock to speed up the hatching of their eggs.
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In 2018, or “octopus garden” had been found near Davidson Seamount, on the coast of California, in the United States. The new discovery was announced by the British newspaper The Guardianon Wednesday the 23rd.
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A team led by researchers from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBari) returned to the site several times with a remotely operated diving robot.
Discoveries about octopuses
Experts have recorded that each female lilac octopus, little bigger than an orange, lays about 60 eggs on the rock, and then guards them until they hatch.
Temperature probes showed that the water bathing the eggs ranged from 5°C to 10°C. Meanwhile, less than 1 meter away the temperature dropped to 1.6°C.
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By revisiting individual nests, the team of scientists found that, instead of taking a decade or more to hatch, as usually happens in the deep and very cold sea, the babies are born there in almost two years, which increases their chances of survival.
The hot water comes from hydrothermal vents and, although heated, they are not as scalding hot as deeper hydrothermal vents. “It never gets superheated (enough) to cook an octopus’s eggs,” says Dr. Jim Barry of Mbari, who led the study.
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