February 27, 2007: Psychedelic octopus

[Undertoad]

You haven't seen this beast before -- it's new, or at least, new to us.

LiveScience has the full story and several other images. To sum up:

The Larsen Ice Shelf in Antarctica is breaking up, a result of global warming. Two years ago, a sector of it the size of Rhode Island collapsed. Ocean that had been covered with ice 220 metres thick, for 12000 years... was suddenly open sea.

This gave researchers the chance to investigate a huge area of the earth that they couldn't really look at before. First, they found crabs attached to methane gas vents... something you figure I must have made up, but no, there they are.

See, even if it's mind-boggling, nobody is going to drill through 220M of ice just to study methane-eating clams.

But now, without all that ice to contend with, they've found 1000 species there, 30 of which are previously unknown to us. This freaky octopus is one of the new creatures.

They figure most of the species had been there all along, with a few beasts moving in to take advantage of the new conditions.

Suggested by Jacquelita