PARIS: On the ocean floor near the Galapagos Islands, a submersible controlled by scientists came across a mysterious octopus as blue as the ocean and no bigger than a golf ball.

“He’s tiny! It’s blue!” one excited scientist was recorded as saying when she first caught sight of the cerulean cephalopod on footage transmitted from the sub.

The team from the Charles Darwin Foundation had just discovered a new species of octopus nearly 1,800 metres below the water’s surface, according to research published on Monday.

“Right away, I knew it was something really special,” said octopus expert Janet Voight, who was asked to identify the strange species. At first the curator at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago had to make do with photos of the animal.

Then she received its preserved body in the mail. “When it arrived, I was like ‘Oh! My goodness! It’s beautiful’,” Voight said.

She was immediately interested because the closest known octopus of that shape lives off the coast of Uruguay — in a different ocean on the other side of South America.

Normally to describe a new octopus species, a specimen needs to be cut open so that its mouth, beak, teeth and other parts can be examined. “We only had the one specimen, so I didn’t want to take it apart,” Voight said.

Instead, the team at the Field Museum used CT scans to take thousands of X-ray images, then compiled them to make a 3D model of the octopus, revealing its insides.

“There’s nothing like spending the day looking at something no other human has ever seen,” the Field Museum’s X-ray lab head Stephanie Smith said in a statement.

The new species, named Microeledone galapagensis, stands out for reasons other than its blue hue, which is believed to be the rarest colour in nature.

Published in Dawn, May 26th, 2026