The Octopus’ Garden

A story from Chad King.

Octopus brooding

This story includes an underwater mountain 8000’ tall, a Remotely Operated Vehicle and some star-struck scientists who’ve suddenly and most unexpectedly come upon thousands of brooding octopus, only the second such aggregation ever found. Chad, a Research Specialist for the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, is still over the moon about this discovery. So much to learn, and he shares so much with us right here.

CHAD KING is a Research Specialist employed by the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, which operates under the auspices of NOAA[1]. Chad notes that he and his colleagues are all given this generic job title, but perhaps it is appropriate as he feels like he’s a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none, which he thoroughly and completely enjoys. He’s not interested in being painted into a corner, doing one thing only for his entire career.

Chad likes to dabble, be informed, experiment and learn about many of the disciplines and subjects within the field of marine science. He was hired to work with GIS – geographic information systems, making maps, doing cartography, and conducting spatial analysis, as well as doing research diving.

Chad has specialized in coastal kelp forest ecology for most of his career, diving up and down the California coast, including a lot of exploration along the Big Sur coastline, working with the state of California counting fish, invertebrates and algae when the state was creating Marine Protected Areas.

Chad was born in Pinehurst, North Carolina. His dad was in the military, at Fort Bragg, California at that time, but his mother did not want Chad born on a military base. His family moved to San Jose, California when he was 8-months old, so he considers himself a native Californian.

As a kid Chad wanted to be a paleontologist, a marine biologist or a doctor.  But when he was in elementary school, he had a very distinct fear of the ocean. Every time he went to the beach, he was unable to bring himself to go into the water past his waist. The fear of the unknown was too strong, and he was scared of what might be out there. Not just sharks, but anything else.

However, Chad also had a natural curiosity for things and how things work. So he figured one way to combat his fear was to understand it. And then he really started to get interested in the ocean and started diving in to understand it. At that time the Discovery Channel was just starting, and Chad began studying Mutual of Omaha and Jacques Cousteau films. Then he fell in love with the concept of exploring the deep as well as coastal oceans.

Chad got his Bachelor’s degree in 1995. He worked on his master’s thesis down in Baja California studying a non-geniculate algae called a rodolith and its association with a little sea anemone. Chad wanted to understand their interactions and how they worked together. Though he does note it was a great excuse to go down to Mexico and scuba dive and drink Tequila.

After getting his Master’s Degree, Chad decided he wanted to go for his PhD. However, the professor he wanted to be sponsored by, John Pearse, was retiring the following year. So instead of school, Chad ended up taking a gap year and paying off his student loans. But one year quickly turned into four. Chad says it was easy to get used to the paycheck.

The field he was in at that time was commercial real estate. He was doing IT and support, and a lot of the brokers were trying to get him to get his license to start working alongside them. That’s when Chad realized, however, he wasn’t going over to the ‘dark side’.

Chad also had gotten a lot of encouragement to pursue what he loves, and he realized he wanted a professional degree, though not necessarily a PhD. He was very interested in attending Moss Landing Marine Labs (MLML). He applied there and got accepted working under Jonathan Geller, an invertebrate zoologist.

Chad came to Monterey in 1999 when he began his graduate work at Moss Landing Marine Labs. He was then hired by the California Department of Fish and Game (CDFG, now CDFW[2]) in Monterey and moved to the city of Monterey in 2000. In 2002, he got a job with the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary.

So his childhood interest turned into his passion and he stuck with it. Chad says, “I got lucky with my job.” He’s been able to scuba dive up and down the coast and around the world, and now he’s doing some pretty exciting deep-sea research.

Chad continues to follow his path of interest, and emphasizes that it’s working out really well. Over the last four or five years, he’s been put in charge of the Sanctuary’s deep-sea research, mostly because of logistical reasons, but recently it’s turned into a lot more than that. Even though deep-sea research is not his area of expertise – Chad’s more of a ‘Caltrans[3] Director of Deep-Sea Research’ – he says it’s been great. He’s very excited and pleased with this direction, as his team has been making all sorts of amazing discoveries!

Chad has been at the Sanctuary now for seventeen plus years, and he’s found himself sliding into whatever position has needed to be filled. Sometimes he’s been back doing IT. He’s created an app for Android and iPhones, which encapsulates all of the photos surrounding him in his office, and thousands more. There are now over 5000 photos free, online on a website[4] the Sanctuary staff have developed. Chad also does video production, data analysis, writing papers, deep-sea research, and continues to work in kelp forest ecology. That’s why he loves his job. There’s something a little bit different each week or month.

 You can watch Chad’s story on Youtube here: https://youtu.be/wu8pWjeSsJA

THE OCTOPUS’ GARDEN

“This looks like something Dr. Seuss created. It doesn’t look real.”

In 2018 we were tasked to go out on the exploration vessel Nautilus, which is run by OET, Ocean Exploration Trust, and Dr. Bob Ballard, who discovered the Titanic, runs that outfit. So OET and Office of National Marine Sanctuaries had an agreement to use the vessel to go out over a three or four year period of time and visit different sanctuaries. They also do other things, too. In fact, Bob just got back from a trip over the summer, a big Amelia Earhart expedition, which just aired on National Geographic. That’s the same vessel we were using.

So we went out in October of 2018 to go to this underwater, extinct volcano called a seamount – Davidson Seamount, to look for corals and sponges in places that had not been explored yet; kind of the apron of the mountain. This mountain is quite tall. It’s almost 8,000 feet tall, so it’s like driving over Donner Summit in the Sierras, and it’s twenty-six miles long, eight miles wide.

We’ve explored a lot of the top. We get these massive long-lived corals and sponges there, which is one of the reasons why this area was added to Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary in 2008 to protect those corals. So we were charged with going out to explore the flanks of the seamount, the foothills of the seamount, if you will, for corals and sponges, and near the end of our first dive, which was about 35 hours, is when we came across our special find.

These remote operating vehicles can be in the water for quite some time. They don’t require any bathroom breaks or food or anything like that. The humans up top, who were watching everything comfortably with a cup of coffee, take these four-hour shifts twice a day. And we stream everything live to the internet on nautiluslive.org, which is just incredible in bringing in other people.

We also have a science chat room, where we have experts that can be watching live as well. And they interact with us via private chat room to tell us the identity of an animal, or ‘hey, I would like a sample of this’, or ‘hey, can you preserve it like that?’ So it really broadens the amount of expertise we can bring out with us. It’s an incredible operation. It’s just really eye opening.

So the last hour of the dive, we came across this pocket. To see octopus down there is not unusual. Seeing one that’s brooding, meaning taking care of its eggs, is also not unusual. But you see them just by themselves; they’re solitary. However, we came across a pocket of about twenty brooding females, and we thought that was peculiar. And they were within this little depression, at the top of this little ridge, so we decided to go and investigate.

When we landed we realized, as the camera stabilized, the water was shimmering as it was coming out of the seafloor, much like you would see air shimmer off the pavement on a hot day. It creates that shimmering oasis effect. And we immediately thought, ‘this is warm water.’ This is big news! Nothing like that has ever been discovered around here. The fact that there were twenty octopus there, “Wow!” They’re all lined up in this pool of warm water. Clearly, clearly they chose to be here. Why is that? Questions start flying through our heads.

I think this is new, but we’re not cephalopod experts. We don’t know if this has ever been discovered before.  We’re starting to fly through with the ROV. People get excited. So, we decide the last 45 minutes of the dive we’ll go down slope to the east. Then we just started running into pockets of hundreds of octopus. Well over a thousand in the duration of the dive. And we landed in a couple of places, and every single place where there was a big aggregation, the water was shimmering, indicating there was warm water, most likely, coming out of a seep. We couldn’t measure it at the time since we didn’t have access to a thermometer, but we were very excited.

Not only that, but there were many other animals associated with these seeps, too; snails, shrimp, anemones, tubeworms, all sorts of stuff, so clearly there’s a community dynamic going along here, too. And the questions just kept piling in our heads.

As it turns out, this is only the second such octopus association, brooding octopus associated with warm water, ever found in the world. But at the other place, there was only 106 such individuals. Here we had well over a thousand that we counted within an hour. So we knew this was a big deal!

Unfortunately, the ROV had some technical problems.  We had thought we were coming back for a second dive right away there, but we didn’t end up coming back. And so it was very, very disappointing and depressing, but still very exciting that we discovered this within the last hour, cause we could have easily missed it. It was pure luck running into this.

So fast-forward to March of this year (2019), about five or six months after the original expedition, and the BBC had a weeklong television event going on called Blue Planet Live. They were going to be broadcasting from several locations around the world, and one of them they wanted to broadcast from was this octopus garden.

So they invited me along, and I physically got to get into a submarine and dive down deep. Now this is thirty-two hundred meters, which is more than 10,000 feet, more than two miles under the surface of the ocean. It took an hour and a half just to get down there, and that’s going fast. It probably was one of the most incredible experiences of my life in terms of my job and what I’ve been able to do. I’ve scuba dived up and down the Big Sur Coast, I’ve traveled to a few places here and there, but to actually be in a submarine, like Jacques Cousteau, two miles deep in the cold, dark water of the ocean, looking at these octopus moms that we’d just discovered was a transcendent kind of experience. It was absolutely magnificent.

I got to do a second dive to the top of the seamount as well, where I’d seen all these large, ten-foot tall bubblegum corals for the better part of the last fifteen years, but now got to see them in three dimensions. I don’t think people understand the difference between seeing them on a screen like this, and being able to look out of a porthole and see a whole landscape, not just a screen. Then you get context, perspective, depth, you get all these things that the human eye can bring that a television monitor and camera can’t. Again, it’s an experience I’ll never forget.

We were able to measure the water temperature. We had been told it probably couldn’t be warm, but indeed it was. It was almost ten degrees Celsius, which is in the low fifties, in terms of Fahrenheit, but it’s near freezing down there in the ambient surrounding seawater, just about 34 degrees Fahrenheit, 1.7 degrees Celsius.

So, wow, what is attracting the octopus moms? Is it the warmth of the water? Is it something in the water? Is it that the water cleans off the rock and they can smell their eggs better? Again, question after question after question starts piling up. That’s what usually happens in science. Once you answer one question, it suddenly generates ten more. It’s this bifurcating tree of, you know, curiosity I guess.

We were able to come back for one short dive in August with MBARI, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, and we were able to collect a couple of octopus specimens and actually get them identified by some experts around the world. They did confirm it as Muusoctopus robustus. We also collected a lot of animals that live within the vent, and there’s still ongoing analysis going on there. But we’re looking at isotopes to determine what the critters feed on. We collected water for water chemistry: all sorts of amazing things to be discovered.

And then we had this most recent expedition last month in October of 2019, back on the Nautilus. This is the original vessel we used in 2018. We revisited the first octopus garden. We were able to measure more temperatures. We now have a watermark high of 10.4 degrees Celsius. So that’s getting up there. That’s almost the surface temperature of the ocean out here, when you go surfing or boogie boarding.  So it’s getting quite warm for the deep sea.

We left a lot of data loggers out that we’ll be retrieving next year at some point, probably next fall. This is great, because every time we measure oxygen and temperature, it’s just a moment in time. We know it’s 10.4 degrees right now. Well, how does that spot change day to day, week to week, month to month, tidally, yearly or whatever? We were able to leave loggers there that will constantly record these variables. So when we go back, we can look at how these things change over time. Which will answer a lot of questions about the system.

We also collected more water for water chemistry analysis. And then we collected a few more animals as well. I’m just really excited, because we also were able to visually survey this entire feature, so we saw quite a few more octopus. I have a feeling we’re well over 2,000 now, in terms of numbers. We just have to go back and count them all on the video, which is going to be a fun, tedious job. But we can crowd source it. There’s been plenty of volunteers that are willing to do it.

The second dive was to continue what we wanted to do last year until we stumbled on this octopus garden, and that is look for corals and sponges. We did find some incredible sedimentary cliffs that were more than fifty meters tall and reminded me of scenes from an Indiana Jones movie, or the desert southwest or the Grand Canyon. It was remarkable geology. Nothing too much in the way of corals and sponges, but a lot of interesting stuff we discovered.

Then we came across a whale fall serendipitously, just like last year we came across an octopus garden, and that was another incredible find! It’s estimated there’s only been seventy-five whale falls ever documented that people have come across. That includes whales that were purposefully sunk. They were maybe beached whales, and researchers were able to take the opportunity to sink them in the ocean to then see how this environment changes: how the ecology succeeds from these scavengers that eat most of the flesh, to the bone eating worms that embed within the bone, to when it becomes just a reef of bones in five to ten years, or whatever it may be.

This one was estimated to be several months old, only five meters long, so relatively short, but it was still in the middle stages of scavenging, so even though most of the flesh was gone, the internal organs were there. A lot of blubber was still there. Octopus, all sorts of fishes and crustaceans were there, just consuming the remaining tissue.

And then the bones were covered with this fuzzy red and yellow ‘hair’. Those were the bone-eating worms, genus Osedax, and they were only discovered in 2002 by MBARI. So we knew this is also an exciting find, because it’s rare to come across these worms. We know they are all around the world, but what makes them come and settle on bones, when these bones can be miles to dozens of miles apart? It’s a very interesting process.

Over the course of time there, we were able to make some collections of some of the bones that had the worms in them, along with other animals. Again with the power of the live-streaming and science chat the Nautilus has, we were able to get in touch with the experts of bone-eating worms while we were on site. They were able to provide expert direction on what to collect and how to preserve it.

Since then, we have given them the samples. They collected them from us when we disembarked, and already we’ve confirmed one new species of bone-eating worm. There may be several more, too, so I’ve already been in conversations with those scientists. They’re over the moon about this. So are we. This is the power of collaboration of science and technology together.

I’m real excited to see what else will come out of this, too. We’ve collected eDNA water, to look at the DNA that’s floating around in the water. We’ll be able to identify a lot of things. Then more samples of worms and crustaceans and other animals as well, to understand what drives this unique thing. Because whale fall is a huge input of carbon and food to the deep sea, which most of the time relies purely on marine snow - just the particles of organic debris that rain down constantly, but it’s really low amounts of food.

Everything happens so slowly in the deep sea. Metabolism happens so slowly down there, which is one of the reasons we’re still interested in the octopus garden, too, because another species of octopus has been tracked to take fifty-four months or four and a half years to brood their eggs. We don’t know how long this species broods, but for example Giant Pacific octopus up in shallow waters only takes three months to brood. So we know that it takes longer in the deep, and maybe living in the warm water speeds up that development. We don’t know. These are some of the questions we want to try and answer.

In the last hour of this second dive after the whale fall, I wanted to go up this volcanic cone, this bump on the seafloor. In previous cones we had not found any vented water, but I just kind of theorized that this is what they call a ‘low temperature ridge-flank hydrothermal system’, that’s a mouthful. Essentially warm water, ocean water is going through rocky outcrops, maybe the seamount itself, traveling underneath all of the sediment that’s been piling up over the millennia and millions of years, slightly getting warmed by the earth’s crust, and coming out in weak points. It’s like a pressure differential. So it squeezes out these little broken areas of rock.

So, the idea is to look for broken areas of rock, anything that’s volcanic or crackling, you know, that kind of thing. That’s a very scientific term. (Laughter) Sure enough, we came across this second volcanic cone, and near the summit we found some venting water. Peculiarly, we did not find any octopus associated with this first vent, but I had a feeling we would eventually find them, and then as we neared the summit, we started seeing lines and lines and lines of these octopus. It was just absolutely incredible.

So, in the last forty-five minutes or so of the dive, after the whale fall, we came up the cone and we found this area of venting water. It was interesting that we didn’t find any octopus associated with it. But it was shimmering, and we measured it. It was at 5 degrees Celsius. We collected some water. But I instructed the pilots, “Let’s just keep going. I know there’s going to be octopus here, cause there’s venting water,” and sure enough, at the summit, we found these lines of octopus by the hundreds. Just like a network of veins and arteries, all associated with this venting water coming out of this cone.

We didn’t measure any more, but we confirmed presence of eggs in most of these places, and really tried to go as fast as we could to visually survey as much as we could, because we did have to pull the ROV due to impending weather – a big swell was coming along the coast.

Regardless, even though we only saw the tip of the iceberg, or the tip of the cone, literally, of this place, we really want to come back here, and that’s one of the plans for next year.

Overall, it’s been an incredible experience being a part of three Nautilus dives, discovering two octopus gardens, a whale fall, going out with the BBC and diving in the Alvin[5]. These are things I could not have even dreamt of a year and a half ago. That’s how quickly things happened. I think that’s the power of exploration and why exploration still needs to occur.

I think a lot of people assume, “Oh there’s been plenty of deep sea research”, and all that. Not really. Less than 5% of the seafloor has been accurately mapped, and less than 1% has been surveyed to any extent. If you think about it, we’re on the slopes of this mountain, which is much larger than a small state, basically, like Rhode Island, and the equivalent of what we are doing is being dropped out of a helicopter with like a big headlight, you know, or maybe being in a small car and we’re just driving along. And we’re trying to describe the entire area based on a couple dozen hours of driving very slowly, about 3 miles an hour through a park, or through a street, or a neighborhood or whatever.

I think people have to realize we’re seeing such a small bit of the seafloor every time we explore. It’s important information, but because we’re exploring such a fraction of a percent, this is the kind of stuff that you come across occasionally, and this is why exploration is so important.

Experts are telling me, “There can’t be warm water coming out of here. We know this area.” And sure enough it’s warm! No one had any idea that octopus were here in the numbers associated with warm water. No one knew of this whale fall here. We know they exist, but we don’t know where they are.

So all of these are very serendipitous events, but highlight the importance of exploration and why we need to continue to explore.

[1] National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

[2] California Department of Fish and Wildlife

[3] California Department of Transportation

[4] https://montereybay.noaa.gov/materials/imagesvideo.html

[5] Manned deep ocean research submersible vehicle, operated by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.