Octopus Innovations: Life in the Abyss – Dr. Rachel Lauer (Transcript)

And in 2014, we went to those depths.

Deep-Sea Exploration

So here is an A-frame actually shown on the Atlantis research vessel. It is launching Alvin, the deep submergence vehicle capable of diving to 6,500 meters. And then this is a picture with somebody’s thumb, obviously, the other scientists who took it, smiling because I’m on my way to the seafloor, still wearing shorts, and I know I’m on my way because at the bottom of the ocean it’s one degree and I’m wearing all the clothes that I brought with me. So why am I here?

Well, it turns out I was part of a team of scientists, microbiologists, geochemists, hydrogeologists, and a geophysicist who were looking for a place to sample fluids coming directly out of the ocean crust. These fluids were important to us to understand and identify the reactions and processes that are actually sustaining an enormous population of microbes that we now know live in the ocean crust. These could also help us understand potentially the potential for life on other worlds like Titan and Enceladus. So the location we actually chose was this small extinct volcano surrounded by a vast muddy desert at the seafloor, and our calculations and modeling suggested that at this location, this rocky part of the seafloor should be spewing water like an underwater geyser.

When we arrived, there was no geyser, and instead we saw scenes like this one where we turned on the lights at the seafloor. We saw tons of octopus holding their heads with their arms, the eggs lining the cracks where gentle stream of warm, shimmering water is bathing those eggs. This is not what we were expecting to find, and our team, again, had no actual biologists. So we had no idea what we’d discovered.

The Unknown Seafloor

Unfortunately, it turns out a lot we don’t know about our own seafloor. Despite the ocean’s role in our planet’s health and resilience, and in our major energy industries, we know very little about the seafloor on planet Earth. We’ve actually mapped using modern ship-based technology only 20% of the seafloor, and seen with our own eyes, either through camera work or direct observations through submersibles, less than 5% of our seafloor. And it’s true to say that we actually know more about the surface of our moon, Mars, and Venus than we do about our own seafloor.

Why is this? Well, everybody can open up their phones and Google Earth and see, I see a map of the seafloor, what’s the problem here? Well, it turns out that the maps that are generated for most of our seafloor are coming from satellite imagery and satellite calculations. Those calculations can only resolve structures that actually are more than a kilometer high above that seafloor.

So this map of our planet actually reveals how little of our seafloor has actually been mapped, where the dark places represent places that have not been covered with modern multi-beam bathymetry or other geophysical methods. So why is this? Well, turns out that ships tend to follow direct paths or shipping lanes that minimize expensive travel between two points, rather than aiming to map the extent of our seafloor. What we really need is to move across the ocean like a lawnmower to provide that coverage that we really need to map.

Hydrothermal Circulation

In places where we actually do have maps of the seafloor, this is kind of what it looks like. We can see these tiny little hills and mountains that cover the seafloor. The larger ones we call seamounts, and the smaller ones we call outcrops. Because most of the seafloor, 90 percent, is actually covered in sediments, these little structures provide the only pathways or conduits for water to move from the ocean into the crust where they heat up and make their way to another mountain poking up through those sediments.

This process of hydrothermal circulation is the focus of my research, and I use math and computers to simulate and understand this process better. This is an artist’s rendition of this process, where that cold, dense bottom water on the left makes its way into a seamount, travels under those impermeable sediments to another seamount, transporting heat and solutes throughout this process. Why is this important? Well, it turns out that this process of hydrothermal circulation is responsible for removing 20 percent of the Earth’s total heat.

That is a huge deal. This process is also responsible for recycling the entire ocean crust every 1 to 10,000 years, and our entire ocean is recycled through this process every several hundred thousand years. Now, as a geoscientist, that’s, like, the blink of an eye, but I realize it sounds like a long time to most people. To put it into context, our entire ocean has been recycled through this process several hundred times since the age of the dinosaurs.

The Costa Rica Discovery

By using heat flow measurements, which is what I do, we can identify these places where cold water is entering the crust and chilling a certain area, and where that warm water exits, moving that heat towards another site. Previous heat flow studies in Costa Rica have identified that something really unusual was happening there. So this is a map of the seafloor off of Costa Rica in the Pacific Ocean. I should note that Costa Rica by country is 90 percent deep ocean, and this previous geophysical investigation in this area revealed that in this area around these little bumps or seamounts of the seafloor, up to 80 percent of the heat that should be present based on the age of the crust is missing.

It turns out the only physical process that is capable of removing that much heat is, you guessed it, hydrothermal circulation. So scientists identified 11 outcrops in this area that appear to be connected by this process of hydrothermal circulation, and in particular, it was hypothesized that lots of water was going into the blue circle, which is called Tango Sed, and that water was all coming out at Dorado outcrop. And this made Dorado outcrop that ideal location to sample those fluids coming directly from the crust, untainted by seafloor installations or drilling. And this is a video of that sampling.

Just background, we used a reverse-engineered horse dewormer that was triggered at the seafloor by the manipulator arm on the submarine, and we successfully acquired that sample, okay? That was the trigger and slurping of that fluid sample. And remember, this is not the only thing we found. This is what we came to do.

The Octopus Discovery

We also saw this. And this video, you can see the shimmering water, there’s a temperature sensor trying to take temperature measurements of water coming out, and they bump the octopus, and she is not happy because now those eggs and her clutch of eggs have been exposed, and you can see her arms reaching around to try and protect them. So this video was published with the geochemistry results and was seen by actual octopus biologists resulting in these headlines. So sure, they captured our serendipitous discovery as well as the biologists’ concerns for this colony of apparently brooding octopus.

Remember, their arms over their heads are actually them in the brooding position getting ready to deploy their arms against any predators that are coming for their clutch of eggs, and I also learned that apparently octopus spend years guarding that clutch of eggs. The last days of their life, they don’t eat, they don’t sleep, they don’t do anything else. The concerns of the biologists who saw the video were several reasons. They’d never seen large numbers of octopus brooding, they’d never seen them in the deep ocean, and when they zoomed in on the egg sacs, they could not see the tiny little blue eyes that signify a viable embryo.

And more importantly, the temperature of the water that was bathing those eggs was too high to be able to transport sufficient oxygen to fully incubate those eggs into embryos. So despite the presence of the eggs and this warm water, they were very concerned. The story could have ended there, and it almost did. Ten years passed, there was a pandemic, you may remember, but the original team knew that we had to come back to really understand what was happening down there, to understand if there were other outcrops nearby that hosted similar colonies of brooding octopus.

A New Mission

And to do that, we would need the right team. Then we had a new mission, assembled by Beth Orcutt from Bigelow Lab of Ocean Sciences in Maine. She contacted the researchers from the home country of Costa Rica, as well as the original team from the original cruise, to assemble the right team with lots of biologists and submitted a proposal to Schmidt Ocean Institute to gain access to their state-of-the-art vessel. Schmidt Ocean Institute co-founders Eric and Wendy Schmidt, Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, provide access to this incredible vessel, its laboratories, equipment, high-performance computer system, to scientific proposal writers through a competitive process.

And they do this at no cost, which is a huge deal for those of us in the ocean community, because as you can imagine, ship time is expensive. So this is a glimpse of some of the technology. This is the Falkor II, the very large research vessel. That’s a side view.

There’s the top view. This is a drone shot just showing you sort of the magnitude of the ship. And really, the workhorse in this type of platform is the submersible. So the remotely operated vehicle, his name is Sebastian.

He has the capacity to work and operate for days, if needed, at the seafloor, covering the seafloor back and forth like we need. So the other thing that’s happening on this particular platform is a bank of cameras that are live streaming back to the communication room, but also to the world through YouTube. So everything that we did was live streamed throughout. So we have philanthropic support for the ship time secured.

This newly revamped team began meeting about six months prior to our launch last July. That new team consisted of 70% women, and more than half of the science team was from the home country of Costa Rica. That is a composition I have never experienced until this cruise. It also included two artists to capture the wonder of the deep ocean and some of the crazy stuff we’re seeing down there, and two policy experts who were working to protect regions like this one from the prospect of deep sea mining.

So this is the closest I’ve ever come to equitable collaboration and research in any capacity, and it’s in large part due to Beth’s incredible leadership. What does that look like? This is a picture of it. Every single day at 7 p.m. after dinner, before Sebastian came back and we started unloading and processing all the samples, we had a science meeting. That seems like not a big deal. I’ve been offshore for two months with one science meeting in two months.

And what that means is that every distinct voice was heard in those meetings, in the planning, despite all having very different goals for their individual science. I mean, one person wants water column data, one wants sediment cores. I wanted heat flow measurements. And somehow she managed every day in one hour meeting to ensure that everyone’s needs were at least acknowledged and heard, if not met, despite the constant need to pivot.

The Surprising Results

So here’s a drone shot of us actually heading back into port after what was an incredibly successful mission. So what did we find? Well, we thought the news was big last time, albeit a little bit sad. The news from this one actually went completely viral around the globe.

Not only was the nursery still alive and active, but had literally doubled in size. In the first dive, in fact, we watched tiny little baby octopus hatch and swim away with lots of squealing. In addition, we discovered that there were nearby seamounts hosting other octopus nurseries and two more seamounts that we found were actually communicating with each other using the same methods that we used to discover the first nursery. We also now think that those octopuses had hacked their own biology to shorten the amount of time that they spend protecting their eggs.

And they’re using that warm water that was bathing their eggs as some combination of a maternity spa and an incubator to shorten that time to maturity. This discovery and understanding has no chance of happening without working across these disciplines as a team. The more we look in the deep ocean, the more we find. And that is true of everyone who’s done this type of work.

I’m just going to play this because it’s the cutest thing I’ve ever seen. There is the little baby octopus swimming away from where he just hatched and probably terrified of this large metallic object that is right near him. But that’s his first swim or her first swim. So this experience has actually changed the way that I want to do science.

Looking to the Future

After making that connection between the hydrothermal fluids coming out and these biodiversity hotspots like the colonies of brooding octopus that we found, I’ve started collaborating with biologists and policy experts to ensure that these areas can be expanded as official marine protected areas by including what we now know about flow and connection between these networks of seamounts.

And really to ensure that these regions will be present for future generations. It’s actually estimated that there are more than 100,000 seamounts around a kilometer tall that remain unmapped at the seafloor and 25 million outcrops the size of Dorado, which is where we discovered the first deep-sea octopus nursery. We need to connect flow between our disciplines and get out of the silos we’ve been in for hundreds of years if we want to understand and preserve the seafloor and all its mysteries.

Thank you.

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