What appears to be a half-squid, half-octopus specimen found off Keahole Point on the Big Island remains unidentified today and could possibly be a new species, said local biologists. The specimen was found caught in a filter in one of Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority's deep-sea water pipelines last week. The pipeline, which runs 3,000 feet deep, sucks up cold, deep-sea water for the tenants of the natural energy lab. "When we first saw it, I was really delighted because it was new and alive," said Jan War, operations manager at NELHA. "I've never seen anything like that." The natural energy lab is a state agency that operates Hawaii Ocean Science and Technology Park in Kailua-Kona, adjacent to one of the steepest offshore slopes in the Hawaiian Islands. According to Richard Young, an oceanography professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, the specimen tentatively belongs to the genus Mastigoteuthis, but the species is undetermined. War, who termed the specimen "octosquid" for the way it looked, said it was about a foot long, with white suction cups, eight tentacles and an octopus head with a squidlike mantle.

The octosquid was pulled to the surface, along with three rattail fish and half a dozen satellite jellyfish, and stayed alive for three days. According to War, the lab usually checks its filters once a month, but this time, it put a plankton net in one of the filters and checked it two weeks later. The pitch-black conditions at 3,000 feet below sea level are unfamiliar to most but riveting to scientists who have had the opportunity to submerge. The sea floor is full of loose sediment, big boulders and rocks, and a lot of mucuslike things floating in the water, which are usually specimens that died at the surface and drifted to the bottom.

View: Full Article | Source: Star Bulletin

Cool.

just like a Liger

Bizarre. Lot of articles about squids on this website, aincha?

Is it possible for an octopus and squid to mate?
Lions and tigers have done it but not under normal circumstances.
I wonder if this new specimen has the color changing abilities
as the octopus.
Too bad they couldnt keep it alive for further study.
Mabye this was a baby that got caught and there are giant ones
out there in the deep!

*Hears the 'Jaws' theme in the distance.*

That said. COOOOOOOOOOOOL! Calamari that changes color. Wonder if you eat it with marinara sauce... Or something a little different. Don't know, never eaten cooked octi before. Had a little of it sushi style, and hm... I'll stay away from that sushi.

Going back on topic!

I don't think it would be that weird to find something like that. I mean, the Earth's covered by how much ocean? If there are new discoveries to be made. That's where we'll make them. So much to explore and our technologies can only go so deep. Maybe that's a good thing. Humans as a race, really aren't smart enough to deal with all that we 'know' now. But given time to iron out the wrinkles...

Okay now I'm darting off.

Hmm..it would be interesting if this was a crossbreed.

Wait 'till they do some DNA tests on it and get back to me.

can we eat it?

Cool.

But can it produce fertile offspring? I wonder how many of them there are out there.

Of course, it COULD be an intelligent alien who's playing stupid so he can study us...

Squid also have eight tentacles. My guess is this is just a squid with tentacles that look more like octopus tentacles than other squid. Studying the picture in the original story, I see that two of the tentacles look much thicker than the other six. That's typical for a squid but not for an octopus.
The story says "the head of an octopus...". I couldn't see that on the picture, I'm not sure what it means. Squid and octopi are closely related. That they share lots of features is hardly surprising.

"Bizarre. Lot of articles about squids on this website, aincha?"
Squid are very cool. You can tell they're smart from the way they interact with each other and hunt, but they are so very strange at the same time. We're used to smart animals walking on four furry legs and begging us to fill their food bowls, not squirming through the ocean with tentacles and shooting ink. The incredible skin that can change color so fast that it can flash or send shimmering waves of color amazes me. I saw a video of two squid arguing. Both are sending waves of shimmering color across their skin, faster and faster. With their superb eyes, it seems the skin color change ability should be able to transmit a lot more information than just "keep away!". I wonder if they have a language we haven't even suspected.
Here's a blurb explaining how they change colors so fast:
http://www.mbl.edu/publications/pub_archiv...uid/skin.4.html

I though up an experiment. Train one squid in a complex puzzle to get a reward. Then put that squid behind a transparent wall and put a new squid in the tank with the puzzle. Assuming the trained squid is interested in helping the new squid, if the new squid is able to solve the puzzle without being trained, it could mean that the original squid is telling it how to do it. I don't know if squid ever cooperate though. The trained squid might keep the information to itself.

Edit:
Here's a video of an octopus changing color and greatly changing its skin texture as well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCgtYWUybIE...ted&search=

Here's a video of some cuttlefish, relatives of squid and octopi. About 3:15 into the video you can see a cuttlefish doing the shimmering waves thing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4sUohLs-Ek...ted&search=

absolutely fascinating, knocks spots off Harry Potter for sheer magic.

cool. a new species.

absolutely fascinating, knocks spots off Harry Potter for sheer magic.

I though up an experiment. Train one squid in a complex puzzle to get a reward. Then put that squid behind a transparent wall and put a new squid in the tank with the puzzle. Assuming the trained squid is interested in helping the new squid, if the new squid is able to solve the puzzle without being trained, it could mean that the original squid is telling it how to do it. I don't know if squid ever cooperate though. The trained squid might keep the information to itself.

I think thats a brilliant type of idea! But as you said, they might not be interested in helping eachother. But why not do it using, lets say, a male and female during mating season! That might work. I would kill to work with these beauties!

What if it was just a squid that evolved to look more like an octopus, and we never discovered it until now?

When you said "these beauties!" a thought occurred to me. We are planning our tests and our expectations according to things that we two-legged, air-breathing apes think are important and/or desirable. To many-legged deep-sea creatures, the things that you and I think make a good life might have no meaning at all. What would a "sunset" mean to a creature that evolved to live miles beneath the surface? What would "family" mean to a creature that sprays its eggs or its sperm into a boiling frenzy of its fellows once a year? We are very, very arrogant when we imagine that we can decide what defines an intelligent creature.

Edit: I wrote this because your phrase, "these beauties", snapped me partway out of my unthinking human mentality. My questions about what is "beauty", what is "family", what is "nation", etc. are hitting me hard right now. Thank you for making me question my comfortable, dry, warm reality.

just as arrogant as to think that we are intelligent i presume

Man, so much hostility, haha, && great find Saruman!

Well one thing is because of pressure and temperature differential.
we have more to discover deep sea. it's like space in earth.

I believe they do actually call it 'Inner Space' as compared to Outer Space.