When she spotted a mako shark in Hauraki Bay off the coast of New Zealand, Rochelle Constantine, a marine ecologist at the University of Auckland, was concerned. The animal had a curious orange brown mass perched on its head.
“In the beginning it was like, 'Is that a buoy?”,” Dr. Constantine said. “Is it intertwined with fishing gear or did you get a big bite?”
Wednesday's engineer, Davis, sent a drone to see the 10-foot long shark. As the boat approached, her colleague Esther was stuck and hanging overboard to record footage underwater.
“We could see these tentacles moving,” Dr. Constantine said.
Their eyes were not fooling them. The octopus was on a shark. They called it the “sharktopus” and said it was one of the strangest things they've ever seen in the ocean.
The team identified the eight-arm commuter as Maori octopus. The heavily fortune cephalopods grow up to 6.5 feet and weigh about 26 pounds. They are the largest octopus in the Southern Hemisphere. Even the huge predators like the short-fin macaw shark, this hitchhiker occupied many rooms.
“We know that a shark's head needs a considerable amount of real estate,” Dr. Constantine said of the encounter he recorded in December 2023 while exploring outdoors to study marine life and birds.
He thrusts his arm into the tight ball and Storeway seemed unnoticed. The octopus was not clinging to the shark “like on a whimsical banana boat,” Dr. Constantine said. “Sometimes these little tentacles are drawn in.”
The shark may not have been able to see the crafty head and feet, but it is most likely that they know its passenger. Sharks have sensory organs throughout their body called lateral systems, which help them perceive the world around them.
Sharks and whales sometimes attract suction cups, which cling to protect them, removing dead skin and parasites from the predator's body. Machus is known to leap over the surface of the water. Some researchers speculate that when they pop out of the water, they're trying to drive these riders away when they get frustrated. However, the shark appears to have not been bothered by its freeloader.
“The shark looked very happy and the octopus looked very happy,” Dr. Constantine said. “It was a very calm scene.”
The Short Fin Makos is the fastest shark in the world and can swim at a top speed of 46 mph. “If the shark moved faster, the octopus would probably not have been able to grip it,” she said.
What was the destiny of the unlikely duo? “I don't know what happened next,” she added. If the octopus slipped off, the shark might have eaten it. Similarly, in water bodies, this shallow (just 100-130 feet deep), octopus can safely land on the seabed.
The biggest mystery is how these animals met. Maori octopus lives on the seabed. The shortfin machos can swim over 1,000 feet deep, but are not usually found on the seabed. “It makes no sense that these two animals should be in the same place and time to meet each other,” Dr. Constantine said. “I don't know how they found each other.”
“It's almost impossible to guess whether this shark and octopus have come together or what the nature of their connection will turn out,” said Abigail McCarts-Gollop, an associate professor of marine conservation in the UK who was not involved in Dr. Constantine's observations. “But is that important?”
Dr. McQuutters-Gollop is fascinating, but he thinks what the team has observed is a reminder of how much we don't know about the ocean and how important it is to protect it.
“The natural environment is a place where something special happens every day,” she said.
