According to a "Census of Marine Life," a complex project that is trying to map the oceans from microbes to whales, many deep-ocean octopuses share an Antarctic origin and sharks have a “singles bar” where they gather.
As far as the octopuses are concerned, the species could all be traced back to a shallow-water octopus called Megaleledone setebos, which is only found in the Southern Ocean.

This is the fourth update of the “census,” released Sunday, and it is just one of the reported discoveries of 2,000 scientists from 82 countries working to create the first “census” of marine life; a 10-year project to count and map all of the life in the world’s oceans from giant oysters in the eastern Atlantic to a carpet of tiny crustaceans in the Gulf of Mexico.

"What we're trying to do is synthesize all of these different pieces of the marine ecosystem and put them together into a coherent story that connects from the top to the bottom and from the Arctic to the Antarctic," says Ron O'Dor of the Census of Marine Life. The deep-sea octopus study, along with dozens of other projects will be presented at the World Conference on Marine Biology, which begins in Valencia, Spain, on Tuesday. The $650 million census will come to an end in 2010. It has identified 5,300 likely new species, of everything from fish or corals and so far, 110 out of them all have been confirmed as being new.

The report says that octopuses apparently spread around the world after Antarctica became covered with a continent-wide ice sheet more than 30 million years ago. As the Antarctic got colder, ice increased and octopuses were forced into deeper water, senior scientist Ron O'Dor explained. Deep-water octopuses worldwide, he pointed out, lack the ink sack that allows their shallow-water cousins to shoot out a camouflage screen. Ink is no longer necessary for where they currently live.

Moreover findings showed that white sharks traveled thousands of kilometers to spend six months at what researchers called the "White Shark Cafe" in the Pacific between Hawaii and California. "There is something going on there but as yet we don't know," said marine biologist Professor Ron O'Dor. "Maybe it's just a good place to pick up girl sharks." It appears that while there, both males and females make frequent, repetitive dives to depths of 975 feet which researchers find significant for either for theis feeding or for reproduction.

Among other findings were a predatory comb jelly anchored to the seabed in waters 23,680 ft deep near Japan. In the eastern South Pacific, researchers found a diverse set of giant, filamentous, multi-cellular marine bacteria. They may be "living fossils" that developed in the earliest ocean when oxygen was either absent or much diminished, living on the toxic gas hydrogen sulfide. Reefs deep in the Black Sea are made of bacterial mats using methane as an energy source.

"The release of the first "census" in 2010 will be a milestone in science," said Ian Poiner, chair of the Census's International Scientific Steering Committee and Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Institute of Marine Science. Once the census comes to an end, the plan is to publish three books: a popular survey of sea life, a second book with chapters for each working group and a third focusing on biodiversity.