 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 gonna have one 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 favorite 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. And one of the things you hear about octopuses is that the only hard 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 serida and inserida. And serid octopuses have internal shells like squids do. And they use those shells as anchors for muscles because they swim differently than the inserid 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 serid octopuses that are named for these weird ears that they use to fly through the sea. They're called dumbo octopuses, for obvious reasons. And they're really great, and they are deeply mysterious. There are 13, possibly 14, possibly 11 known species of dumbo octopus. We're pretty confused because several of them have only been found one time, including one that hasn't been seen since the 1800s. Oh my god, what are you doing? That's really cute. Does that mean they're rare? Have humans and our dastardly humanization 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 octopus than we know about because they're very good at living deep down. Usually between 10,000 and 13,000 feet. The one species has been found at 23,000 feet down. For comparison, the deepest spot in the ocean is 36,000 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 it 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. Look at those ears. I know they're not ears, but look at them anyway. John, I can't wait to hit you next month 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 Leone. We are doing the DFTBA Pin Pals Bizarre Beasts Pin Subscription Club. That's 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 three different flavors, a common, an uncommon, and a rare. And it's $12 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 it's going to 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 Live project is amazing and it's constantly live streaming on YouTube. I've put some links to their work here on the screen and in the description.