Researcher Godehard Kopp was diving off South Sulawesi Province (map) when he noticed a tiny yellow-and-black striped fish swimming alongside a similarly colored mimic octopus.

Surprised, Kopp, of the University of Göttingen in Germany, filmed the event and sent the video to biologists Luiz Rocha and Rich Ross at the California Academy of Sciences and for their interpretation.

Rocha and Ross only compounded the mystery. "We've never seen anything like that before," Rocha said.

(Pictures: Masters of Undersea Camouflage.)

Jawfish normally stay hidden in ocean burrows, avoiding predators. "I've never seen one swimming in the open," Rocha said.

But the jawfish in the video, wiggling its body "almost like a tentacle," closely follows the mimic octopus for at