Japetella?

[tonmo]

Schmidt Ocean spotted one of these on a dive yesterday (depth 880m):

https://twitter.com/x/status/1679273871466278913

Identified by @jeffday as Japetella. A question was posed: is the brightness here just a reflection off the ROV, or does this species have bioluminescence?

Information on these guys seems hard to come by; any ideas @GPO87?

A broad paper re: ink sac evolution which includes Japetella:

The ink sac clouds octopod evolutionary history - Hydrobiologia

Difficulties in elucidating the evolutionary history of the octopods have arisen from problems in identifying informative morphological characters. Recent classifications have divided the largest group, the incirrate octopods, into five groups. These include the pelagic superfamily Argonautoidea...

link.springer.com

 

[jeffday]

ill have to link some of the papers i've found on them, they've apparently got the lowest metabolism of any cephalopod except for vampyroteuthis and the dumbos

this one might be bolitaenia or japetella, i'm not really confident in differentiating the two, unless this was the specific observation that janet voight ID'd as japetella in which case i'd definitely go with her ID lol