OK!,
FIRST, you have an Octopus hummelincki (look back a post #10 where I gave you a link to another that came from AquaCon and I mentioned that you would be lucky if this is what shows up). There are several telling features that your photos (we MUST work on your upload approach in October
) provide. The BIGGEST telling photo is the last one. Look closely just under the eye and you will see a little "target". This eyespot (
ocellus, ocelli for the pair). Both the Caribbean hummelincki and the Pacific bimacs (bimaculoides and bimaculatus) have a similiarly colored set of rings. Given that we know it is from the Caribbean (very possibly Haiti) O. hummelincki (priorly known as O. filosus, common bumblebee octopus) will be the match. For more verification, look at the rings around the sucker edges in post #14, You can see that they are a blue/purple (the bimac's sucker rings, when they show color will be orange). This is a diurnal species and usually does not disappoint (we have seen a few bimacs as well a hummelincki that were not day active but not many).
One odd thing about this species is their size range. They have even been classified (but then changed) as a dwarf species and many we see are only slightly larger than an O. mercatoris. However, some reach a mantle size equal to or larger than O. briareus (arms will be much shorter). Age is nearly impossible to gauge. There is an indent near the back of the mantle that I have noted while raising O. briareus. I call it the adult dent but have no idea what it is or why it forms. With O. briareus, it seems to signify coming of age (sexual maturity). DaVinci shows this dent so I am guessing teenager to full adult on that privately held observation
.
Octavia was my last octo of this species. You can see other journals by looking for the species and clicking on the names shown in the
lists of our octopuses (stickied at the top of this subforum). If DaVinci is male, you will have a great time keeping it. Unfortuantely, if it is female, she is likely to lay eggs soon and they are not viable to raise. For reasons unknown (but my guess is being out more hunting food as they prepare for brooding) females of this species often lay eggs shortly after being introduced to a tank. Octavia never laid eggs and makes me wonder if she was a he and that I missed the hectocotylus (less obvious in this species than in most others but still identifiable). An alternate thought is that she tried to lay infertile eggs at the time of her major inking event but the eggs did not properly form (I saw nothing in the tank to suggest this so I am trying to second guess what happened). A third alternative would be that this species does not lay infertile eggs. A long shot, at best.