This specimen doesn’t match any octopus species in our reference catalog with confidence, and we’ve logged it as unidentified pending review by an outside cephalopod taxonomist — a review that, three years later, still hasn’t produced a conclusive answer.
That’s a fairly normal outcome for deep-sea invertebrate photography without a physical specimen: photo-only identification has real limits, and we’d rather log an honest “unidentified” than force a guess into the public record.
The image remains in our open archive in case another lab working the same ridge system recognizes the specimen from separate fieldwork.