A bomb cyclone that descended on British Columia’s coast recently carrying fierce winds and heavy rain also had many ocean mammals - including a very resilient Giant Pacific Octopus - bracing during the stormy turbulence.
Just after 2 a.m. on November 20, 2024 the octopus was captured on camera at Ocean Networks Canada’s (ONC) subsea observatory research site at Folger Pinnacle off the west coast of Vancouver Island gripping a rock as the storm raged above the surface, creating washing machine-like conditions deeper in the ocean.
The camera at Folger Pinnacle records for five minutes at the top of every hour and by coincidence captured the sea creature in a tenacious tentacle battle against the forces of nature. The wave heights recorded during the video were roughly 10 metres compared to an average one metre swell, creating tremendous pressure. At the same time the currents were rapidly changing direction and at great speed.
Watch the octopus’s rippling mantle in this video.
ONC hosts a range of ocean sensors 25 metres below the surface at the research site near Bamfield, Vancouver Island, as part of its 800-kilometre NEPTUNE (North-East Pacific Time-series Undersea Networked Experiments) observatory, delivering real-time data to the Ocean 3.0 data management portal.
Kate Moran, ONC President and CEO, says ONC measures everything possible in the ocean so when conditions change due to factors such as climate change or storms, scientists can interpret the sensor data and also see what is happening to marine life such as octopuses, a resilient species dating back 400 million years.
“The seafloor environment can change rapidly under high currents and we have data now to look at the before and after in this location and get an idea of the impact,” she said.
Data available on Oceans 3.0 shows horizontal and vertical of the ocean at Folger Pinnacle during the bomb cyclone storm in November 2024.
Typically, current speed builds over a tidal 12-hour period to about 60 centimetres a second. However, during the bomb cyclone, the instruments showed that currents were fluctuating at 200 centimetres a second (over three times the norm), and then dropping back to 15 centimetres a second within four seconds.
"The octopus in the ONC video is sending us an important message: that collecting ocean data is not just about human applications, for our models and management needs, but also to understand the underwater world from a marine life point of view,” said Eddy Carmac, Ocean Observatory Council board member and emeritus senior research scientist, oceanography, at the Institute of Ocean Sciences.
“With ONC’s real-time observatories, we can access the immediate impacts of extreme weather events, such as heat domes, atmospheric rivers, and bomb cyclones. With more than 12,000 ocean sensors, we can provide ocean intelligence from an animal's point of view, and answer questions like: what acoustic pollution frequencies disturb lines of communication; what wavelengths of light are used by individual members of a food web system to find prey and avoid being eaten; and what range of oxygen, pH, salinity and temperature define the "life space" of marine species? The sensory ocean. There is no limit to this line of inquiry.”
All the data from the bomb cyclone event is available on ONC’s video repository, SeaTube, creating potential new opportunities for researchers to study the impacts of major storms in the subsea ocean environment.
ONC scientific data specialist Alex Slonimer made the octopus video discovery during data quality checks when it appeared the velocity of the storm had affected two of ONC’s Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler units. Dubbed ONC’s ‘data detective,’ Slonimer made a similar unique find earlier this year when he observed how the compasses on ADCPs were impacted by a geomagnetic storm.
