Eyecatching discovery

[OB]

Quite beautiful to see, for those who hadn't yet: photographs taken for the first time in the Mediterranean of (a living) Tremoctopus gracilis (female).

http://uwpresse.com/SERVER/reportages/MARINE_LIFE/TREMOCTOPUS/index.html

What beautiful creatures they are.

 

[chrono_war01]

Beautiful animal, very gracful...and it looks like a dress tossed under water......

 

[main_board]

Wow! Incredible! Does anyone know what all that webbing is for, and if thats the right word for it?

Cheers!

 

[bigGdelta]

Beautiful, just beautiful.

 

[OB]

Could be for display purposes only, to capture prey or to improve specialized locomotion/gliding... Given the 1:40000 weight ratio between the genders, it might have a specific function during mating, even. Any suggestions from the octopusologists?

 

[CapnNemo]

Fantastic images, great find ob.

 

[OB]

Thanks, please notice the eggs as carried/sheltered by this particular female.

 

[monty]

vit entre 120 et 750 metres de profondeur?

I know water conditions make it hard to judge depth sometimes, but if that's any deeper than 30m I'll eat my wetsuit. So is the claim that it's found between 120m and 750m wrong, or was this photo shoot some sort of anomaly?

She's a beauty, though, for sure...

 

[OB]

Given the fact that both occasions (that I know of, anyway...) where this species was photographed at the surface involved females laden with eggs, it might be that the release of a new generation takes place higher up the watercolumn for reasons of avoiding predation or food abundance?

 

[main_board]

Food abundance makes sense, though I though usually cephs just released the eggs in one fasion or another and let the little ones find their way to the surface. And the colours!! That really made me question whether they were deep dwellers as they look it in other regards, but the colours are just fabulous! I know colour is not a definitive characteristic of shallower species, but wow! just Wow! Check out tolweb.org: http://tolweb.org/tree?group=Tremoctopus&contgroup=Argonautoida
for somemore really cool pictures including a series from Florida taken at about 15 m depth. Not as colourful, but still amazing. Plus that one has these two filaments coming off its web which are actually extensions of arms I. They're description says this about their vertical distribution:
"...occupy surface waters of tropical and subtropical oceans..."
Cool!

Cheers!