Good morning John it's Friday,

Do you remember my previous Mola Mola based promise to bring you weird animals more often.

I have solidified this idea-every month for the next year,I’m going to have 1 video on this channel that is about a weird,amazing animal and there’s also gonna be a little bit more to this idea that I’ll tell you about at the end of the video and I wanted to start with another old favourite of mine.

Octopuses in general are ,of course,very good and weird with their chemical sensing suckers and distributed nervous systems and gelatinous muscle bodies.One of the things you hear about octopuses is that the only hard part part of their bodies are their beaks and they can fit through anything larger than the size of that beak and that is true...of some octopuses but there are actually two sub orders of octopoda:there’s cirrata and incirrata and cirrata octopuses have internal shells like squids do and they use those shells as anchors for muscles because they swim differently than incirrita octopuses were used to,they have ears-they don’t actually have ears,they have flappy fins above their eyes that look like ears that they use for efficient swimming and steering.

There’s a group of cirrata octopuses that are named for these weird ears they use to fly through the sea,they’re called Dumbo octopuses for obvious reasons and they are really great and they are deeply mysterious,there are 13 possibly 14 possibly 11 known species of Dumbo octopuses:we’re pretty confused because several of them have only been found one time, including one that hasn’t been seen since 1800s.

Oh my God what are you doing,that's really cute.

Does that mean they're rare ,have humans and our dastardly humanisation of the world destroyed these peculiar beauties?No, actually they’re probably fine it’s hard to know-they just live in parts of the ocean that are very  difficult to get to. There are indeed probably way more species of Dumbo octopuses than we know about because they’re very good at living deep down-usually between 10000 and 13000 feet-though one species has been found 23000 feet down. For comparison,the deepest spot in the ocean is 36000 feet below sea level so these little cuties live down deep.

Most of the footage in this video was taken by the ocean exploration trust’s exploration vessel Nautilus so thanks to them for that.

One of the biggest problems animals in the deep sea have to solve isn’t how to survive,they do that mostly by moving very efficiently and eating things that move very slowly and not having very much competition,but to breed,you need to like encounter any member of the opposite sex and while that happens,it’s likely that won’t  happen when the female has lots of extra energy and a great place to lay and protect eggs;so when a male Dumbo octopus meets a female, he just hands over a little package of sperm and is like hey use this whenever it works for you , bye and then the female can wait until she’s in a really good situation to care for her eggs before fertilizing them so Dumbo octopuses are good because they’re cute and strange and mysterious and huge at family planning and look at those ears,I know they’re not ears but look at them anyway.

John,I cant wait till next month to hit you with another bizarre beast and here is the extra part of the project-to help raise money for our community’s work decreasing maternal mortality in Sierra Lione,we’re doing the DFTBA pin pals bizarre beasts pin subscription club ,thats right,do you see it,do you see this Dumbo octopus on my lapel,it was there the whole time.No it wasn’t ,I wasn’t wearing this before. Each pin will have 3 different flavours-a common,an uncommon and a rare-and it’s 12 dollars a month,free shipping everywhere in the world and you can only get it for this week for the whole year, that’s the only time its gonna be available and also,John tomorrow is Esther day so everybody get ready to tell the people that you love that you love them.

John,I’ll see you on Tuesday 

Thanks again to the ocean exploration trust,their nautilus exploration live project is amazing and it’s constantly live streaming on YouTube.I’ve put a few links to their work here on the screen and in the description.