Creature Found 1,773 Meters Deep Described as “Adorable,” “Alien,” and “Basically Already Living Rent-Free in My Head”

Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat

SANTA BARBARA, CA — Scientists announced this week the discovery of a new octopus species off the Galapagos Islands, which they have named Microeledone galapagensis, and which the Southern California surfing community has already named Dave.

Tiny Blue Alien Octopus Confirms What Malibu Always Suspected

The discovery, which technically occurred in July 2015 but was only formally published in a scientific journal this week because science moves at the speed of peer review rather than TikTok, has reignited the perennial debate about whether octopuses are, in fact, extraterrestrial beings who have been quietly cohabitating with us in the world’s oceans while we were distracted by other things.

The theory, known as panspermia, holds that life — or at least the seeds of life — travels between planets. While mainstream science remains skeptical that the octopus specifically arrived via cosmic delivery service, Southern California’s surf community, which has always had a complicated relationship with mainstream anything, is not backing down.

“Bro, I told people for years,” said Zeph Connolly, 34, of Ventura, who has been making this argument at lineups up and down the California coast since approximately 2019. “The eyes. You look into an octopus’s eyes and it’s not a fish looking back at you. It’s something else. It’s considering you.”

Dr. Janet Voight, the octopus expert who authored the paper on the new species, did not respond to requests for comment from the Southern California surfing community, which is frankly understandable.

The Numbers Are Hard to Argue With

Octopuses, as any surfer who has spent time watching YouTube at 2 a.m. after a particularly good session can tell you, have 30,000 genes — approximately 10,000 more than humans. They can change color, squeeze through any gap larger than their beak, use tools, solve puzzles, and have distributed nervous systems in which a significant portion of their neurons live in their arms rather than their heads.

This last detail is either evidence of alien engineering or proof that you don’t necessarily need a central brain to function adequately, which offers certain members of the Southern California surf community uncomfortable implications about their own neurological arrangements.

Scientific American covered the discovery with appropriate academic enthusiasm, noting that the researchers’ first reaction upon encountering the creature via their robotic submarine was audible cooing. “Is that a cute little guy or what?” one scientist said on the video recording, a sentiment that has since been endorsed by essentially every person who has watched the footage.

SoCal’s Ocean Relationship Deepens

Southern California surfers, who spend more time in the Pacific Ocean than perhaps any non-marine demographic in American life, have always maintained a particular relationship with cephalopods. Octopus sightings while surfing are rare but transformative events, typically described in terms usually reserved for religious experiences or unusually good swells.

“I saw one once at Rincon,” said Tamara Winfield, 28, of Carpinteria. “Just hanging out near the rocks. I paddled over and we looked at each other for a long time. I don’t know what it was thinking, but I felt like it was judging my board selection.” She paused. “It was a midlength. The judgment was probably fair.”

The SoCal surf community has historically been ahead of mainstream scientific consensus on several ocean-related matters. They knew about great white shark population recoveries before they became a policy issue. They were talking about microplastic contamination in the 1990s. Their position on the octopus question, while not peer-reviewed, is consistent and passionate.

What Happens Next

Scientists say Microeledone galapagensis will be studied further, its habits, habitat, and evolutionary history catalogued with the kind of patience that distinguishes science from surfing. The California surf community, meanwhile, is already fundraising for a live-feed underwater camera near Galapagos that they can watch between swells.

“If they’re down there at 1,700 meters,” Connolly noted, staring at the horizon in the way that Ventura locals do, “imagine what’s at 3,000. That’s where the real ones are. The ones that built the first ones.”

Nobody asked him to elaborate, but everyone present at the parking lot conversation felt the statement had a certain poetry to it, even if it made no scientific sense whatsoever.

For more ocean science, alien speculation, and surf community reactions to things happening far from the actual surf, see The London Prat, covering the human ocean relationship from a safe, dry, British distance.

Further recommended reading at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and Cracked.

The Panspermia Debate: Where Science Ends and Parking Lot Philosophy Begins

The panspermia theory, which suggests that the building blocks of life travel through space and can seed life on new planets, has legitimate scientific proponents and is studied at institutions including Harvard, whose records note the theory dates to at least ancient Greece. Where the science ends and the Venice Beach parking lot philosophy begins is somewhat harder to map, but the California surf community is comfortable operating in that gray zone.

What drives the octopus-as-alien theory is not actually panspermia’s core claim — which is about microbial life in space — but rather something more intuitive: the sense that the octopus is simply too different, too intelligent, too strange in its architecture to have evolved alongside us from common ancestry. The feeling that looking at an octopus is looking at something genuinely other is not irrational. It is, in fact, a reasonable response to an animal that has three hearts, blue blood, and the ability to edit its own RNA in real time in response to temperature changes, which is the kind of biological capability that sounds like it was invented for a science fiction novel and then accidentally included in the animal kingdom by oversight.

Southern California surfers who encounter octopuses in the water — which happens, particularly around rocky reefs in Laguna and Point Dume — report a specific quality of encounter: the octopus sees you, calculates something, and makes a decision. The decision is usually to leave, but slowly, and with dignity. Nobody who has watched an octopus decide to leave has ever described the experience as watching a simple animal. “There’s someone in there,” is how Zeph Connolly puts it, and however unscientific that assessment is, it captures something that the papers in their careful language are also trying to describe.

Further alien life humor: McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and Cracked.

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