You wouldn’t think a giant octopus could hide in plain sight for decades. But researchers have now learned that the giant Pacific octopus (GPO)—the largest known octopus on Earth, ranging from California to Alaska to Japan—is actually two species. Now that we’ve been properly introduced to the new “frilled giant octopus,” we’ll need to learn more about it to ensure its survival. 
 
 
 
 This discovery isn’t a total surprise. Scientists have suspected for decades that giant Pacific octopus might be an “umbrella name” covering more than one species. In 2012, researchers from Alaska Pacific University and the US Geological Survey found a genetically distinct group of GPOs in Prince William Sound. Unfortunately, they’d collected only small snips of arm tissue for DNA analysis before returning the octopuses to the wild, so they couldn’t find out whether the two groups might be visually distinct as well. So Nathan Hollenbeck, an undergraduate student at Alaska Pacific University, tackled these cryptic creatures for his senior thesis by looking at shrimp fishing bycatch, where the octopuses commonly turn up. 
 
 Shrimp fishers in Alaska lower baited pots into the water, let them sit for up to a day, then retrieve them to get the shrimp that have climbed in. Occasionally a giant octopus will climb in too—perhaps interested in the bait, or perhaps simply investigating crevices, as octopuses are wont to do. “Usually the octopuses have eaten the shrimp,” Hollenbeck told Earther, “so there’s a lot of shrimp shells and legs and antennae.” 
 
 Hollenbeck quickly found that he could identify two kinds of giant octopus just by looking at them. One was the familiar GPO; the other sported a distinctive frill along the length of its body. These frilled octopuses also exhibited curious “eyelashes” of raised skin, and bore two white spots on the front of the head, where GPOs have only one. 
 
 
 
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 To confirm that the visually distinct group matched the genetically distinct one, Hollenbeck cut off tiny pieces of the octopuses’ arms. And because he wanted to know if future work could avoid this invasive sampling technique, he also collected DNA by swiping the octopuses’ skin with cotton swabs. 
 
 “Presumably, people have been catching these octopuses for years and no one ever noticed” 
 
 You’d probably prefer that a doctor swab your cheek rather than stick a needle in your arm—or snip off the tip of a finger. (At least octopus arms regenerate.) Other animals probably share this preference. Scientists routinely use non-invasive sampling techniques on mammals and birds, but Hollenbeck was the first to try swabbing an octopus. It worked like a charm, and DNA from arm tips and swabs agreed: the frilled octopus is a separate species from the GPO. Hollenbeck and his advisor David Scheel published their results in November in the American Malacological Bulletin. 
 
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 “Presumably, people have been catching these octopuses for years and no one ever noticed,” Scheel said. Frilled giant octopuses appear to be less widely distributed than GPOs—Hollenbeck and Scheel have collected reliable reports of the species only from Juneau to the Bering Sea. They also seem to prefer deeper water, unfrequented by tidepoolers or scuba divers. In this habitat, though, they might be fairly common. Frilled giants made up a third of octopus bycatch in Hollenbeck’s shrimp pots. 
 
 
 
 Crab and cod are also fished with pots in the Gulf of Alaska, and it’s likely that many of the octopuses caught in these pots will turn out to be frilled giants, too. No one knows whether that poses a threat to the species’ survival. 
 
 
 
 Even for GPOs, we don’t have enough information to determine whether they’re at risk of overfishing. Government scientists at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center recommend “very conservative” management “due to the poor state of knowledge of the species composition, life history, distribution, and abundance of octopus” in the Gulf of Alaska. 
 
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 For the time being, federal regulations specify a maximum octopus bycatch based on the best available estimates of how many are out there. The Alaska cod fishery has been closed on at least one occasion when it hit this limit. But with GPOs and frilled giants lumped together in bycatch numbers, it’s impossible to distinguish the impacts of fishing on the two different species. 
 
 
 
 The frilled giant octopus doesn’t have a Latin name yet (though it’s expected to be in the same genus as the GPO, Enteroctopus). Named or not, frilled giants will continue to investigate fishing pots and get hauled to the surface, where they will sometimes be thrown back in the water and sometimes killed to use as bait. In either case, they will be recorded as just another giant octopus, indistinct from the GPO. 
 
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 And yet the skin-deep differences between the two species may represent any number of more fundamental differences in lifestyle, diet, or reproduction. About the frill, Scheel said, “I’ve been thinking: why would an octopus have a ledge coming off its body like that? Maybe we’re seeing differences in their habitat selection and ecology reflected by differences in their body.” He’s interested in comparing the giant species to smaller octopuses that also sport frills, to look for patterns in habitat use. 
 
 For now, we know little more than these admiring words of Scheel’s about the new giants: “They’re so pretty.” 
 
 
 
 Danna Staaf is a freelance science writer, author of Squid Empire: The Rise and Fall of the Cephalopods, and followable on Twitter. 
 
 ||||| Of all the animals kept in aquariums around the world, one always stands out. The jellyfish, the sharks, the skates, the giant sea bass, and the clownfish—they’re beautiful and often impressive, sure, but in the end, behind their glass enclosures, they’re basically moving wallpaper. There’s only one creature that knows everything that’s going on, watches everyone who walks by, and judges it all. 
 
 The giant Pacific octopus is both my favorite and least favorite animal to visit at the aquarium. I think cephalopods are fantastic, and octopuses in particular have long been a particular fascination of mine, and the culture at large. But it’s also been clear to me every time I’ve seen one in captivity that it knows it’s being held hostage. When they choose to come out, giant Pacific octopuses don’t just swim around doing their normal octopus things—they perform. Then they disappear again, away from the prying eyes of school field-trip groups and couples on dates. 
 
 The giant Pacific octopus is a master of deception. It play-acts, it camouflages, and it disappears into seemingly impossibly small crevices. Is it any surprise, then, that we know so little about the animal? 
 
 In fact, we know so, so very little about the giant Pacific octopus that it turns out to have actually been two species of octopus this whole time. Recent research from Alaska Pacific University has revealed that some number of giant Pacific octopuses are actually frilled giant Pacific octopuses. Earlier this week, Earther reported on the discovery, noting that the new species had been “hiding in plain sight.” Maybe it was more of a deliberate move of deceit on the part of the octopuses, and not so much a failing of human scientists’ investigative skills. 
 
 During the Alaska Department of Fish & Game shrimp surveys of 2012 and 2013, David Scheel, a marine biologist at Alaska Pacific, and Nathan Hollenbeck, an undergraduate student at the school at the time, collected 21 live octopuses that were snared as bycatch in shrimp pots. 14 of them were clearly giant Pacific octopuses, Enteroctopus dofleini, but the remaining seven were… different. These outliers looked kind of like the others, but they had frills all over their mantles. The seven strangers also had strange eyelash-like protuberances, and two white spots on the front of their heads, whereas the typical giant Pacific octopus has only one. 
 
 The researchers took a swab of epithelial cells—the cells that make up the tissues that line the cavities and surfaces of body organs—from the octopuses, and took them back to the lab for genetic testing. The tests confirmed that, indeed, these seven cephalopods were genetically distinct from the giant Pacific octopus in the scientific literature. 
 
 So far, according to Earther, Hollenbeck and Scheel have only spotted the frilled giant Pacific octopus in waters ranging from Juneau to the Bering Sea. In comparison, their non-frilled genetic cousins have been spotted all over the northern Pacific Ocean, from the western coast of the lower 48 states of the US, up to Alaska, and all the way across the sea off the coast of Japan. 
 
 That said, the giant Pacific octopus is well-known to be a master of disguise, and scientists admit they don’t have a strong grasp on their behavior—to the point where we really have no idea how many of them are out there. In addition, marine biologists and ecologists have long suspected that the giant Pacific octopus might actually be better thought of as an umbrella term encompassing a bunch of different species. So who knows? Perhaps there are plenty of frilled giant Pacific octopuses—which have not yet been given an official Latin taxonomic name—and we just have been fooled this whole time.
– The world has a new octopus: Meet the "frilled giant Pacific octopus," newly detected by a student at Alaska Pacific University working on his senior thesis, reports Earther. The creature resembles the familiar giant Pacific octopus, but Nathan Hollenback not only laid out some distinctive visual differences but took DNA samples that proved it was indeed a new species. One easy giveaway is that the octopus, whose Latin name is still pending, has two white spots in the front of its head, while its more common cousin has one. As its name suggests, the new octopus also has a frill along the length of its body. “Presumably, people have been catching these octopuses for years and no one ever noticed,” says David Scheel, Hollenbeck's adviser. The pair presented their findings in the American Malacological Bulletin. Given that the giant Pacific octopus is a "master of deception," Elijah Wolfson at Quartz thinks it's fitting that the new cousin has essentially been lurking undetected right under the noses of marine biologists for years. The GPO is known to inhabit a wide swath of the northern Pacific, from the western US coast to the shores of Japan, but the researchers for now estimate that the frilly new species has a smaller range, from Juneau, Alaska, to the Bering Sea. They also think it generally prefers deeper waters. News stories about the discovery suggest it's possible that we may someday come to view "giant Pacific octopus" as more of an umbrella term that encompasses various species rather than one distinct species of its own. (Wales recently had an odd octopus invasion.)