Researchers in New Zealand saw a colorful blob on top of a shark’s head. When they looked closer, they realized it had eight arms.
When she spotted the mako shark in the Hauraki Gulf off New Zealand, Rochelle Constantine, a marine ecologist at the University of Auckland, was concerned. The animal had a curious orangey-brown mass perched on top of its head.
“At first, I was like, ‘Is it a buoy?’” Dr. Constantine said. “‘Is it entangled in fishing gear or had a big bite?’”
Wednesday Davis, a technician, sent up a drone to get a closer look at the 10-foot-long shark. As the boat sidled closer, her colleague Esther Stuck dangled a camera overboard to record some underwater footage.
“We could see these tentacles moving,” Dr. Constantine said.
Their eyes weren’t deceiving them. An octopus was riding the shark. They nicknamed it the “sharktopus” and said it was one of the strangest things they had ever seen in the ocean.
The team identified the eight-armed commuter as a Maori octopus. The hefty cephalopods can stretch up to 6.5 feet and weigh around 26 pounds. They are the largest octopus in the Southern Hemisphere. Even riding a huge predator like the shark, a shortfin mako, this hitchhiker occupied a lot of room.
“You can see it takes a fair amount of real estate on the shark’s head,” Dr. Constantine said of the encounter, which the researchers recorded during a field expedition to study marine life and birds in December 2023.