Behind the Shot-Ocythoe tuberculata
My role on the blackwater dives is as a photographer/naturalist, but that's not to say that I can identify everything that we see down there. When somebody comes back with a query I can't answer, I generally respond with a "let me get back to you." In this case, photographer Chuck Babbit approached me days later with an organism he found in one of his shots from the previous night. He was zooming in on a Blastozooid phase salp chain when what looked like a tiny tentacle caught his eye. On further inspection, it was pretty plain he had found a cephalopod of some sort, but I had no idea what kind. In the end, it was Chuck who stumbled across the ID as a tuberculate octopus. Apparently the juveniles cling to salp chains for reasons I can't begin to describe. The next dive I started looking at salp chains and, sure enough, it wasn't long before I found one of my own. That just goes to show how much stuff we completely miss on these dives because we just aren't looking at our underworld through the right lens which in this case, was set to super-macro.