Loki - A. aculeatus

Joined
Apr 12, 2013
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12
His name is Loki. I've had him for about two weeks now. I believe he is a macropus. His mantle is about aninch and a half to two inches. I know he's supposed to be nocturnal but he seems to run on his own schedule. He had eaten a handful of fiddler crabs and frozen clam but had no idea what to do with live clam in the shell

 

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Unfortunately, I can't tell much from the video or photos. Did you happen to take any acclimation pictures? One thing that I think I see are horns above the eyes and I don't recall either of my macropuses (Beldar and Puddles) displaying them. Beldar was quite the wall dancer, Puddles not so much.

In white light, what color(s) did the animal display? Have you seen green speckles/fluorescence like this? Is the general look like this?
 
Shape wise seems the same . When he is in normal coloring he does not have horns and seems to be variety of Browns and blacks with whites spots all over him. But when he goes to "rock" camouflage his skin looks very porous and rough with those two horns you see in the pics.
I'll try to get pics in white light. Normal my tank goes from complete actinic during the day(which I've seen activity from him) to red light during evening night and morning which he is also active.
 
Do you have a link to the original purchase and description? It is fine (encouraged) to list the vendor and provide links (I will include that info in our "List of our Octopuses 2013" if it is posted in a journal). Did you look at the pictures I referenced (all the "this" words are linked to photos in post #4 above).

Macropus is a complex with potentially several yet to be named species. The Abdopus genus also is known to have undescribed animals (you will see this listed as Abdopus sp and often Macropus sp). Vulgaris suffers from a similar collection of octopuses, many animals going in and out of the species classification over time (Octopus filosus was placed into vulgaris and the name declined only to resurface as Octopus hummelincki). With DNA sequencing and growing interest, it will be interesting to see how some of these end up. Neal (spouse) thinks they interbreed :biggrin2:. If you Google octopus macropus in Wikipedia you will see a larger animal in the complex that is found in Mexico where yours likely came from Indonesia (probably the Philippines).
 
When someone asks, "how big do they get" I use Mark Norman's Cephalopods A World Guide for the official answer, partially because I have not kept enough of any one species to be competent to make a call, partly because we (keepers in general) are really, really bad at gauging sizes and mostly because all octopuses come in a wide range of sizes within a single species. For aculeatus, Norman lists the body (mantle from behind the eyes to the tip) as up to 6 cm (~2.75") and arms to 18 cm (~7"). so an arbitray arm:mantle ration of 5:1. Roy has displayed some photos where I would swear they looked larger, some TONMO labeled "aculeatus" are likely to be in the Abdopus family but not aculeatus and I would swear we see longer arms (mantle length seems about right though). One measurement that no one gives and really would add a lot more to understanding overall size is the girth of the mantle at a given length.

Aculeatus would explain daytime activity and you might experiment with white in stead of only blue lighting during the day (but only red or no light at night). This is typically a diurnal species where almost all macropuses are nocturnal (there is one in Norman's book that is supposed to be diurnal but we have never seen it on TONMO). The only time I saw my macropus' out with the lights on was in their final week of life but two other members did see a little daytime activity before they reached senescence.
 

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