Noticia -Encontrada especie de pulpos enanos entre el formol-

Published Saturday, January 29, 2005 by Spyder | E-mail this post

El artículo explica como se están descubriendo una nueva especie de pulpos enanos entre los botes de formol que se guardaban desde hacía décadas en diversos museos. Hasta ahora se creían que eran crías de pulpo, sin embargo un nuevo estudio demuestra que son una especie propia de pulpos enanos.

Bottled Baby Octopuses Turn Out to Be Pygmies
Loren Coleman

The New York Times
September 24, 2002

Bottled Baby Octopuses Turn Out to Be Pygmies
By CHARLES Q. CHOI

In century-old jars of alcohol on museum shelves in Paris and Washington and off the coasts of Indonesia, Senegal and the Caribbean, zoologists are stumbling upon dozens of species of tiny octopuses once believed to be babies of their larger relatives.

Described by their discoverers as Lilliputian, some of the pygmy species are smaller than the hatchlings of the bigger and better known octopus. Each ofthe pygmies is about the size of a thumbnail, with weights measured in tenths of a gram, making them tiny even compared with the inches-high characters in "Gulliver's Travels."

While the researchers are not formally presenting their findings until next year after gathering more data, other top experts in the field who know of their results say these small octopuses are a big deal.

These newly recognized pygmies appear to lurk in tropical waters all over the globe, and their diversity is making scientists rethink what they know about octopuses.

"The more we look, the more we find," said Dr. Eric Hochberg, the curator of invertebrate zoology at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. When octopuses this small are even spotted on expeditions, they are usually tossed in jars and forgotten, Dr. Hochberg said. Over the years, he and his colleague Dr. Mark Norman occasionally received hints that there was more than met the eye with the tiny creatures, from specimens collected during dives or from pictures of the Lilliputians apparently brooding eggs.

Then, when they were in the Natural History Museum in Paris last May for astudy on tropical octopus diversity, they noticed rows of small, alcohol-preserved specimens, some of which sat unstudied for more than 100 years on the back shelves.

Upon dissecting the Marquesan and New Caledonian octopuses, instead of finding infants, Dr. Hochberg and Dr. Norman discovered full-grown adults.

Enlisting another cephalopod biologist, Mike Sweeney, they dug through the collections at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington last July.

They realized "there was this hidden universe under our doorstep no one ever even dreamed of," Dr. Norman said from the Museum Victoria in Melbourne, Australia.

Dr. Norman believes the jelly-bean-size creatures dwell in the crevices of coral reefs or small holdfasts in giant kelp "almost like the lions of miniature rain forests," devouring tiny shrimps, crabs or snails. These shadowy refuges allow the mostly drab pygmy octopuses to live without the camouflage larger species possess.

Dr. Hochberg also believes most of the pygmies probably lack poison, although one pygmy species from the Gulf of California in Mexico has a bite that causes swelling like a bee sting, he noted.

Scientists did classify a handful of pygmy species in the 1930's and 1950's, but nearly all the specimens the researchers have of these new varieties come from museum collections, so their habits remain largely a mystery.

Preservative fluids usually make octopuses lose what natural color they have, and dissecting such tiny animals with precision is difficult.

"The new lower size limits with these octopuses now seem to go to really interesting and almost unlikely degrees," said Dr. Sigurd von Boletzky of the Arago Laboratory in Banyuls-sur-Mer, France, a marine zoologist who works extensively with pygmy squid. "This is same kind of record breaking you'd see at the other end of the size scale with giant squid."

Their size may have been an advantage, Dr. Norman said. "Their big brothers would go roving from the safety of their coral reefs lacking the armor and spines all the other animals take for granted," Dr. Norman said. "They really are filet mignon waiting to be eaten by anyone. If all of your big brothers get eaten, it makes sense to stay home and get small."

Judging from the longer-known mini-species, the octopuses live only three or four months, compared with the one- to two-year lifetimes of their bigger relatives, the researchers said.

Dr. Hochberg, Dr. Norman and Mr. Sweeney continue to work on pygmy specimens from Senegal, Mexico, Panama, New Caledonia, the Marqueses and the Philippines, while doctorate students at the University of California at Berkeley are researching pygmy species in Indonesia and Belize. Dr. Norman says some have also been found in the cooler waters off California and
Australia, and he is holding out hope for polar species.

So far the researchers do not have enough data to fit the new species into the octopus family tree of more than 250 species. There are studies under way to collect tissue samples from a wide range of pygmy species for DNA analysis, as researchers first told United Press International. Dr. Hochberg, Dr. Norman and Mr. Sweeney plan to present what information they have on the pygmy octopuses at a symposium in February in Thailand dealing with cephalopods like octopuses and squids.

"They haven't published anything of this information yet, so none of us know what they're describing," said John W. Forsythe, a cephalopod specialist at the University of Texas Marine Biomedical Institute in Galveston.

"Everybody's waiting for them to get it to us."

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