The Repository Abyss Report: Into the Dark

The Casper Octopus Still Has No Name. Here Is Why

September 18, 2026 · Runtime 23:19 · Watch on YouTube

On 27 February 2016 a NOAA robot sent to collect two rocks at 4,290 metres off Necker Island found a small, ghost-white octopod no one had seen before. Ten years later it still has no scientific name. The reason is in the dive's own recording, said on air half an hour before the animal appeared.

Transcript

A white shape at 4,290 metres 0:00

Forty-two hundred and ninety metres down, north-west of Hawaii, a robot is crossing a flat grey floor. It was sent here to pick up two rocks. On the edge of a low slab, there is a small white shape. Nobody on board knows what it is. Ten years later, it still has no scientific name.

This episode is about that animal, and about why it still has no name. The answer is not that nobody cared. It is written down in the dive's own record, and it was said out loud on the live feed, half an hour before the animal was found. Every moving picture you will see is NOAA video from that one dive. Every number comes from the dive summary, a paper, or the recording.

EX1603 dive 01 0:46

The dive is EX sixteen-oh-three, dive one, on the twenty-seventh of February, twenty sixteen. It is the first dive of the season for NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer. Two vehicles go down together. Deep Discoverer is the robot, with the cameras and the arms. Above it hangs a second frame called Seirios, which lights the robot and films it from above.

The site is about fifty miles east of Necker Island, which Native Hawaiians call Mokumanamana, inside Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument. The island is tiny, a rock of forty-six acres. Under the water, a narrow ridge runs away from it for more than four hundred miles, out past the edge of the United States exclusive economic zone.

A dive sent for two rocks 1:35

That ridge is the reason for this dive. It was requested by the Extended Continental Shelf Program. The question was geological, and simple to state. Is Necker Ridge made of the same rock as Necker Island? The way to answer it was to collect rock from the ridge and compare it with samples already taken near the island.

So the plan was two rocks. Land on a flat surface at about forty-three hundred metres. Drive north-west, up a steep slope, to about thirty-nine hundred. Collect two geological samples on the way. The dive plan adds one more line. Document the biological community, as time permits.

The broken arm, said on air 2:18

Before the robot reached the bottom, the plan got smaller. On the pre-dive check, one of Deep Discoverer's two manipulator arms failed, and an hour of troubleshooting did not fix it. The dive went down anyway. On the way down, the expedition's biologist explained the delay to everyone watching.

One arm left, on the port side, the one with less dexterity. And the decision that follows from it, said on air. Nothing delicate. Nothing particularly small. Two rock samples, hopefully. Keep that sentence in mind, because in about an hour it is going to matter.

It is a Saturday, and most of the science team is not on the ship. The dive summary lists thirteen scientists, from Hawaii to Texas to Moscow. On board, two people narrate the feed, the monument's biologist and a geologist from the University of Hawaii. The rest are watching the same video on shore, and they can talk back.

The bottom at 4,291 metres 3:52

Deep Discoverer touched the bottom at twenty-one fifty-seven UTC, at forty-two hundred and ninety-one metres. Weak current, or none. A floor of fine sediment, scattered with pebbles and boulders coated in black manganese. The dive summary records about two hours and twenty minutes on the bottom. The rest of a seven-hour dive is the trip down and the trip up.

It is not an empty floor, but it is close. Over the next half hour the team logs sea cucumbers, a few shrimp, sponges, anemones, and two fish. One of them is logged, with a question mark, as a lizardfish, Bathysaurus, lying still on the sediment. The pilots measure it the way this robot measures everything, with two red laser dots a fixed ten centimetres apart.

Before the lizardfish there is a purple sea cucumber, with a pale, translucent sail standing up from its back. The team zooms in, checks its gallery, and logs it as Psychropotes, again with a question mark. On this floor, even the common animals get a question mark. Very little lives here, and even less of it has been collected.

22:32 UTC: that's not an octopus, is it? 5:35

At twenty-two thirty-two UTC the robot is working across a flat area of rock and sediment. The wide camera on the robot's frame catches something pale on the edge of a slab, far ahead. The pilot starts to move in, and the room notices it at the same time you do.

Not in the guide 6:16

The pilot zooms. It is an octopus, or something like one. Eight arms, a round mantle, two large dark eyes. And it is almost white. In the control room someone opens the identification guide of the Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory, and starts looking.

The dive is being watched from shore as well as from the ship. On the dive summary's list of participants is Michael Vecchione, of the NOAA Fisheries National Systematics Laboratory, at the Smithsonian in Washington. He studies cephalopods. Four days later, he wrote up what that feed had shown him.

Cirrate or incirrate 7:43

Deep-sea octopods come in two easy groups. The cirrates have fins on the sides of the body, and little finger-like cirri along the arms. They are the dumbo octopods. The incirrates have no fins and no cirri, and they look like the ordinary octopus of shallow water. This one has no fins. It is an incirrate.

And it matches no published record. The suckers run in a single row along each arm, not two. It lacks chromatophores, the pigment cells an octopus uses to change colour. And it does not look very muscular. That is where the ghostly look comes from.

The deepest incirrate ever seen 8:24

Then there is the depth. Finned octopods had been reported deeper than five thousand metres. But every published report of an incirrate octopod was shallower than four thousand. This one is sitting at forty-two hundred and ninety. On the first dive of the season, on a dive sent for rocks, the robot had found the deepest incirrate ever seen.

Vecchione's conclusion was careful and strong at the same time. It is almost certainly an undescribed species, and it may not belong to any described genus. Someone following the dive online said it looked like Casper, the friendly cartoon ghost. The name stuck, and it is still the only name it has.

The lasers, and moving on 9:08

Before the robot leaves, the pilots do the same thing for the octopod. Two red dots, ten centimetres apart, land beside it and on it. We read those frames ourselves. The mantle is about six centimetres across, and the arms spread to roughly nineteen. It is a rough reading, because one dot is on the animal and one is on the rock.

Why it was not collected 10:07

You just heard it. Unfortunately, we have to move on. So, the question this episode promised. Why was it not collected? The recording does not show anyone trying, and the dive summary does not say anyone considered it. What the record does show is a robot with one less dexterous arm, and a plan that had already ruled out anything delicate or small. Deep Discoverer takes its pictures, and drives on.

At about forty-two eighty the sediment gives way. The floor tilts into a slope of hardpan and scattered pillow lava, the rounded shapes lava makes when it erupts under water. Higher up, near forty-two fifty, whole lobes of pillow lava are still intact. This is the rock the dive came for.

Pillow lava is what basalt does when it erupts into cold water. The outside chills at once into a skin, the lava inside breaks through and chills again, and the flow builds itself out of rounded lobes. The geologist on board compared it to toothpaste squeezed out of a tube. Every lobe you see here was once molten rock.

The first rock 11:17

At the base of a flow, the robot finds a loose rock with a manganese crust. The one working arm reaches out. Sample one is logged at twenty-three thirty UTC, at about forty-two hundred and fifty metres. From the first camera on that rock to the rock in the box, the video files span about twenty minutes.

Here is that record, exactly as the summary prints it. The sample number is a string with the date, the time, the vehicle and the dive in it. Temperature, one point four seven. The column header says degrees Fahrenheit, which would be well below freezing. At this depth that number can only be Celsius. The unit in the header cannot be right, and the rock is catalogued anyway.

Reading a rock by its crust 12:51

The geology is read from the crust. Manganese builds up on exposed rock very slowly, so a thick crust means an old surface. The crusts here looked thin, compared with the thick crusts on the much older, Cretaceous flows of the region. Thin crust, younger lava. Earlier, on the way up the slope, the geologist on board had explained on air what the two possible answers were.

The team's reading, in the summary, is that these flows were laid down during Hawaiian volcanic growth, about ten million years ago. Both rocks look Hawaiian in origin and age. So on this flank of the Necker complex, the continuation of Necker Ridge was not observed. The summary adds that lab analysis is still needed to confirm it.

The second rock, and the other arm 14:17

Sample two comes at the base of another pillow flow, at zero thirteen UTC, at about forty-two hundred and twenty-five metres, very close to the end of the dive. Four minutes later the robot leaves the bottom. About two hours and twenty minutes on the floor. Two rocks. One octopod on video. And before the climb, the biologist sums up the day on air.

Sample numbers and one line 14:59

Put the two finds side by side, the way the dive recorded them. The rocks went into a sample catalogue, with numbers that anyone can look up today. The octopod went into the dive's list of animals as a single line. Mollusks. Cephalopod. Pink octopus. That is the whole entry.

And put the time side by side too. The octopod is in front of the robot's main camera for about three minutes, from the first white dot to the last. The first rock takes about twenty. On a dive with one weak arm and a clock running, that is not neglect. It is the plan, followed.

Ka'ena Ridge and the Peru Basin 15:41

What happened next happened on land. Vecchione wrote to two colleagues. Louise Allcock, who was on a British ship near Antarctica, and Uwe Piatkowski, in Germany. Both agreed it was unusual, and a depth record for the incirrates. And the Germans had something of their own, from the other side of the Pacific.

It also turned out Casper had been seen before. In twenty eleven, on a dive exploring the volcanic structure of Ka'ena Ridge, off O'ahu, a geologist from the University of Hawaii, Deborah Eason, recorded one at about four thousand metres. It was sitting on the side of an outcrop, right next to the sampling site. Another rock dive.

The German material came from the Peru Basin, in the south-east Pacific. In September twenty fifteen, the research vessel Sonne sent the robot KIEL six thousand down to a field of manganese nodules, at forty-one hundred to forty-two hundred metres. The cameras there found incirrate octopods too, and some of them were guarding eggs.

In December twenty sixteen the three records became one short paper in Current Biology, by Autun Purser and colleagues, with Vecchione and Eason among the authors. Twenty-nine octopods, from two distinct species, on Ka'ena Ridge, Necker Ridge and the Peru Basin. The depth range of incirrate octopods, extended to at least forty-two ninety.

Look at how far apart those places are. Ka'ena Ridge and Necker Ridge are in the Hawaiian chain. The Peru Basin is more than eight thousand kilometres away, off South America. What they share is depth, cold water, and a floor with hard, manganese-coated surfaces in it.

Eggs on dead sponge stalks 17:32

Two of those octopods were brooding. Each clutch was about thirty eggs, large ones, two to two point seven centimetres. And the eggs had not been laid on rock. They were laid on the stalks of dead sponges, and the sponges had been attached to manganese nodules, below four thousand metres.

The dive off Necker saw stalked sponges too. Its list of animals names Hyalonema, a glass sponge that stands up from the floor on a long stalk, and the team described a glass sponge on air. The stalk is the point. On a flat abyssal floor, a hard thing standing up out of the mud is rare. In the Peru Basin, that is where the eggs were.

How long those eggs take is not known. The water in the Peru Basin is about one point five degrees, and the authors say brooding likely takes years. For scale, the longest brooding ever watched belongs to another deep-sea octopus, off California, at about three degrees. Fifty-three months, one mother, on the same rock.

No nodule, no sponge 18:55

Now follow the chain backwards. No nodule, no stalked sponge. In the Peru Basin that is not a guess. In nineteen eighty-nine a German experiment called DISCOL towed a plough harrow through the nodule field seventy-eight times, over about eleven square kilometres, to imitate mining.

The same Sonne cruise of twenty fifteen went back to those tracks, twenty-six years later. The paper on Casper cites what they found. Near total collapse of the stalked sponge populations where the nodules had been removed. And a separate study of the same survey found the animals that filter food from the water still significantly reduced.

The Casper paper ends on one sentence, and it is the reason it was written. The brooding behaviour of these octopods suggests that, like the sponges, they may be susceptible to habitat loss following the removal of nodule fields and crusts by commercial exploitation.

Nodule fields and crusts. Now go back to the one thing the robot did bring up that day. Two volcanic rocks, each coated in a manganese crust. The dive that found the deepest incirrate octopod was sampling the same kind of hard, crusted surface the paper says that octopod may depend on.

Why there is still no name 20:15

So why, ten years later, is there still no name? NOAA's own answer, ten years on, is short. It is very hard to judge where an octopus like Casper belongs in the tree of life from photos and videos alone. And no specimen has ever been collected.

Video alone can be enough. The first episode of this channel was a comb jelly that was named from footage, without a single specimen. But for an octopod, the people whose job this is say it is not enough, and a species name is the kind of claim nobody should make on a guess.

Seen since, never collected 20:51

It has been seen since. In twenty twenty-three, the Ocean Exploration Trust filmed the Casper octopus in the same monument, at Gardner Pinnacles, below twenty-three hundred metres. In twenty twenty-five, the E V Nautilus filmed one below four point one kilometres in the Cook Islands. Those pictures are not public domain, so they are named here, not shown.

And it has become famous in a way few undescribed animals are. In twenty twenty-five, NOAA notes, the original Casper was the most favourited animal in FathomVerse, a mobile game where players help identify ocean life. It is a favourite face in that game. It is still not a species with a name.

The answer 21:37

So here is the answer. Casper has no name because no one has ever brought one up. And on the day it was found, the robot that found it had one working arm, and a team that had already said, out loud, that it would take nothing delicate and nothing small. It took two rocks, and it ended the dive hoping to fix the other arm, to collect animals tomorrow.

The rocks got sample numbers. The octopod got a nickname from someone on the internet. That is not a scandal. It is what a geology dive with a broken arm looks like. But it is also the most honest way to say why a famous animal can go ten years without a name.

What is still open is almost everything about how it lives. Where the Hawaiian ones lay their eggs. How long those eggs take at one and a half degrees. And which of the two species in that paper each sighting belongs to, which is exactly the question a specimen would answer.

What the record holds is enough to know it is real, and roughly where it lives. A deep flat floor with hard things standing out of it. Crusts, nodules, and the stalks of sponges that grow on them. And a recording of the moment a room full of people realised they had never seen it before.

Next: the Biotwang 22:57

Next time, a sound. In twenty fourteen an underwater glider over the Mariana Trench recorded a call that starts as a deep moan and ends in a metallic twang. It was named the Biotwang. It took ten years, a ship, and sonobuoys to find out what was making it. Next episode, the Biotwang.

Description and sources

EX1603 dive 01 was a geology dive, requested by the Extended Continental Shelf Program to test whether Necker Ridge is made of the same rock as Necker Island. One of Deep Discoverer's two manipulator arms failed before the dive, and the team said on the live feed that with the remaining, less dexterous arm it would not sample anything delicate or particularly small. At 22:32 UTC the robot found an incirrate octopod with no fins, a single row of suckers and no chromatophores: the deepest incirrate ever seen, and, in Michael Vecchione's words, almost certainly an undescribed species. The pilots measured it with the lasers, moved on, and collected two manganese-crusted rocks. In December 2016 Purser et al. reported 29 such octopods from Hawaii and the Peru Basin, two of them brooding eggs laid on dead sponge stalks attached to manganese nodules. NOAA's position ten years on: it is very hard to place Casper from video alone, and no specimen has ever been collected.

PRINT-READY, FROM THIS CHANNEL

Read This Dive, Vol. 01 — the method, and five dives read with it

https://therepository.gumroad.com/l/read-this-dive

PRIMARY SOURCES

NOAA Ocean Exploration, EX1603 ROV dive 01 summary (East of Necker, 27 February 2016): https://oer.hpc.msstate.edu/okeanos/ex1603/EX1603_Dive01_Summary_20160227_FINAL.pdf
NOAA Ocean Exploration, EX1603 dive video and data: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/waf/okeanos-rov-cruises/ex1603/
Vecchione, M., Deep Discoverer Discovers a Very Deep, Ghostlike Octopod, NOAA mission log, 2 March 2016: https://archive.oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/okeanos/explorations/ex1603/logs/mar2/mar2.html
Purser, A. et al. (2016). Association of deep-sea incirrate octopods with manganese crusts and nodule fields in the Pacific Ocean. Current Biology 26(24): R1268-R1269. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2016.10.052
University of Hawaii News, Manganese nodules as breeding ground for deep-sea octopods, 27 December 2016: https://www.hawaii.edu/news/2016/12/27/manganese-nodules-as-breeding-ground-for-deep-sea-octopods/
Robison, B., Seibel, B. & Drazen, J. (2014). Deep-Sea Octopus (Graneledone boreopacifica) Conducts the Longest-Known Egg-Brooding Period of Any Animal. PLOS ONE 9(7): e103437.
Gausepohl, F. et al. (2020). Scars in the abyss: the 78 plough tracks of the 1989 DISCOL experiment. Biogeosciences 17: 1463-1493. doi:10.5194/bg-17-1463-2020
Simon-Lledo, E. et al. (2019). Biological effects 26 years after simulated deep-sea mining. Scientific Reports 9: 8040.
NOAA Ocean Exploration, 10 Years of the Casper Octopus, 27 February 2026: https://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/news/10-years-of-the-casper-octopus/
NOAA Ocean Exploration, Casper octopod (E/V Nautilus, Cook Islands, 2025): https://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/multimedia/casper-octopod/
NOAA Ocean Exploration, ROV Deep Discoverer (lasers 10 cm apart): https://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/technology/subs/deep-discoverer/deep-discoverer.html
Allen, A.N. et al. (2024). Bryde's whales produce Biotwang calls. Frontiers in Marine Science 11: 1394695, the next episode.

ARCHIVE PLATES: all 2 are credited on screen in the video and listed in this project's manifest.

Abyss Report reads the deep ocean through the record that resolved it -- instrument, date, position and the primary sources above.

About the material. Every moving frame is NOAA Ocean Exploration video from EX1603 dive 01 (27 February 2016), public domain, credited on screen with dive, depth and position. The 2023 and 2025 sightings are named, not shown: those images are not public domain. Nine cuts drop the narration and play the original control room audio; each window was re-transcribed in isolation twice and used only where both passes matched. The size reading and the time on camera are our own measurements from NOAA's video and file timestamps. Every diagram is drawn in code from published values. Nothing here is generated.

#DeepSea #NOAA #OceanExploration #Octopus #MarineBiology