It glows pearly white amid the darkness of the deep ocean and propels itself through the chilly water with eight muscular arms and two gigantic flapping ears that look exactly like those of its Disney movie namesake.

In the video and the accompanying research paper , published this week in the journal Current Biology, Shank and his colleagues report that within 10 minutes of hatching, the young octopus behaved like a fully grown adult.

With a remote-operated underwater vehicle, or ROV, he spotted what looked like bumpy balls of chocolate clinging to the branches of a cold-water coral almost 8,000 feet below the surface.

Waving its huge ear flaps — each about as large as the rest of its tiny body — it swam around a small dish, bumping its mantle against the clear glass sides.

The hatchling bore a sac filled with rich yolk, which likely would help keep the young octopus nourished as it figured out how to feed.

The researchers are intrigued by the apparent link between the eggs and the corals on which they are laid, which often are destroyed by deep-sea mining or trawlers that scrape along the ocean bottom.

Understanding the environments that rare animals such as Dumbo octopuses depend on for survival can help scientists come up with strategies to protect them.