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To save you the google search, it's about "tennis ball size" according to https://30a.com/larger-pacific-striped-octopus/ . Somebody should add that to the wiki.
"The most obvious differences between different animals are differences of size, but for some reason the zoologists have paid singularly little attention to them. In a large textbook of zoology before me I find no indication that the eagle is larger than the sparrow, or the hippopotamus bigger than the hare, though some grudging admissions are made in the case of the mouse and the whale."
> "The LPSO is a small animal, with a striped body about 7 centimetres long and spotted arms that make it look like it is wearing a polka-dot dress."
Anytime you're looking for more info on topic while reading its wikipedia article checking the sources is a good place to start.
Is that a joke? It takes over 50 years to come up with a scientific name for a species?
“In the late 1960s, Aradio Rodaniche was diving off the coast of Nicaragua when he made the discovery that has tantalised cephalopod biologists ever since.
[…]
The discovery of an apparently social species was so implausible that few believed it and Rodaniche’s story passed into legend. He published a short account of the species in 1991, but hardly anyone had seen the animal and no one could confirm the report”
That takes account of (at least) a few decades.
I also think the issue isn’t coming up with a name but scientifically describing it. That (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_description) can take time.
Finally, the group of people interested in having a species description may not be very large; and the group willing and able to create one even smaller. Nowadays the money in biology is in biochemistry.
Perhaps, but the caption on the picture in the article [0] says that it was taken at "an aquarium at the California Academy of Sciences", which sounds like the kind of place where octopus scientists hang out. And the article cited in Wikipedia [1] has quite a few authors, which makes me think that there's something more complicated going on here.
[0]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Larger_Pacific_Strip...
[1]: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0134152
Blame I.T. - they keep resetting my password and I'm not allowed to write it down on a Post-It like back in the old days...
Another of my favorite octopus facts, is the existence of octopus settlements, which .. if you think about it .. is kind of astonishing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopolis_and_Octlantis
All the elements for civilization are there .. social life, building constructions, edge-case evolutionary triggers, etc.
I surely hope one day to learn that octopus are on the evolutionary path to take over (not so long) after we're gone .. I've spent countless days in my youth playing with the octopus of the reefs off the coast of Western Australia .. I love them.
They are absolutely wonderful creatures.
I once lured an octopus out of its lair with an Aussie gold coin, reflecting sunlight into its hole until it got curious, and we then spent an hour playing fetch - I'd take the coin to the water surface, let it sink in the sunshine, the octopus would dart around excitedly, catch it, swim around a bit, drop it like a dog playing fetch .. over and over, just the two of us having fun until the surf got too rough and the sharkiness levels went a bit too high for both of us. I sure wish I'd had an underwater camera back then, it was a wonderful moment.
Their main brain is after all very small(although huuuge for a mollusk), most of it is dedicated to the processing of vision, with two big lumps next to the eyes, and there's a small lump in between these two for the brain proper.
Also worth a read - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory
https://www.ciwf.org/media-and-news/press-releases-and-media...
"Other Minds" is definitely worth a read.
A: An immediate cessation of funding and a stern letter from the Ethics Committee.
Q: What do you call a mischievous mollusk?
A: A Naughty-lus
0. https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/p/peter-godfrey-smith-thi...
Unless they actually meant Colombia. But peer review would certainly catch that.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4534201/
They have something like 8 different brains, can regenerate limbs, incredibly smart, can change colors & texture to match surrounds, and more.
A long while back, I read (and just now refound) an article about a biologist's take on cooperation and competition. David Sloan Wilson is quoted as saying "Selfishness beats altruism within groups, [but] altruistic groups beat selfish groups, and everything else is commentary."
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/mar/06/david-sloan-...
Perhaps with sufficient intelligence and time, altruism/cooperation is discovered to be a better fit for any given environment, and that's passed on.
Some will say that AI can solve this, as is the fashion. But so far the things people are interested in doing with the new potential for synthesizing and translating animal sounds does not inspire any confidence[0].
[0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-04/ai-s-next...
Obviously the timelines are insane but just as a thought experiment, I would suspect we would get different answers depending on who you ask, and thus the study, understanding and conservation of other life that shows a form of intelligence becomes much more important to some, whilst human preservation at the expense of all else is more important to others.
(I also recognise you aren't saying that by the way, but it's what came to mind when I read your comment. I personally think we have more than enough resources to do both. I'd also imagine we will learn more about ourselves and what's possible in medicine by studying other species.)
Second, what people know is often valued more. If you can tell people about the environment then you can create a fascination and make them value their surroundings more, maybe causing them to think twice before dumping trash mindlessly in the forest or voting for the next guy who wants to expand fracking operations. And in order to tell them, you first need to understand it.
Third, it can give you material for creating useful tools or medicine which then improves lives, like vaccines or airplanes (which we wouldn't have without curiosity about birds).
Apart from that, it's empathy too. Animals can suffer and causing them suffering is usually against empathy people feel. More understanding helps with that. (It's not too long ago that the prevailing view of "that's just a fish, they don't feel anything, so I can eat them even though I'm vegetarian" was challenged and slowy overturned.)
And finally, beauty. Nature is just beautiful. Compared to a dead rock like mars, it's absolutely amazing what we have around us.
I hope these five reasons give you some perspective as a biology student.
I wonder, what made you choose that field of study?
Let’s raise them humanely, kill them swiftly, and use they wholly letting nothing go to waste.
This is an entirely reasonable ethic.