Imagine if your spouse was 40,000 times heavier and a hundred times larger than you. This is reality for the male blanket octopus, which was recently spotted alive for the first time off Australia's northern coast.

Australian and British marine biologists stumbled across the diminutive male octopus while scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef. Divers spotted a male 2.4 centimeters (0.9 inches) long. By contrast, females of the species grow up to two meters (6.6 feet) long.

"Imagine a female the size of a person and the male a size of a walnut," said Tom Tregenza, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Leeds in England. Tregenza co-authored the study that reported the find in the latest issue of the