This piece was originally published in Vox and appears here as part of our Climate Desk collaboration.
One morning this week, Hanna Koch was snorkeling in the Florida Keys when she came across a brown beer bottle on the sea floor. Koch, a marine biologist for Florida’s Monroe County, picked up the bottle, planning to carry it with her and later toss it out.
Through her dive mask, Koch peered inside to make sure it was empty.
That’s when she saw an eyeball.
“There was something staring back at me,” Koch told me.
It wasn’t just one eyeball, actually—but dozens. Inside the bottle was an octopus mom with a brood of babies.
“You could see their eyes, you could see their tentacles,” Koch said in a recent interview with Vox and The Dodo. “They were fully formed.” (Octopuses technically have arms, not tentacles.)
Instead of taking the bottle with her and throwing it away like she initially intended, Koch handed it to her colleague, another marine biologist, who carefully placed it back on the sandy sea floor. Based on the images and video, Chelsea Bennice, a marine biologist at Florida Atlantic University, said the animal was likely a species of pygmy octopus—making this whole encounter even cuter.
