[Octopus]: Octonaut (species unknown)

I have been able to use very viewable red lights without negative impact as long as I left them on all night. On one tank I have a dome style set of LED's (don't know the wattage), on another I used an outdoor light with red velum and then red painted housing and on a third a red screw-in fluorescent 13 watt bulb (60 watt equivalent). They will never be good for photography but are great for viewing and interacting. I keep a red lit side on all my octo tanks and up until senescence, the animals have preferred this side of the tank for denning as well as awake time.

I avoid flash photography with all my cephs BUT have accidentally forgotten to use my no flash settings (not possible on my newest camera but my Canon did not require me to activate the flash manually). The occasional flash did not produce a reaction and others have had similar results with intentional flash photography. I would not recommend using it often or for more than one shot during an interaction. If you want to try, I suggest using a tripod to get your best image and not trying again if you get a reaction.

New arm growth starts out looking like a thin string. With my first experience, I thought it was dead material from the original injury and wondered if it should be removed :oops:. I left it alone and just observed it to be sure there was no infection. The string developed tiny suckers (or may have had suckers that I could not see) and eventually thickened to recognizable regrowth. On a young animal, it will be hard to detect the repair after several months.
 
Cant believe its been over a week since my last post! Octonaut is just plain awesome.
He is still taking small pieces of thawed shrimp from the stick nightly. He has refused only twice, that I can think of. He likes to hold onto the stick for a while. He tries and tries to get it into his den, to no avail - then lets go.

I believe he finally ate a fiddler. I found what looked almost like a molting - except it was only the top half of the shell with the legs attached. The legs had black gook in them - but because it wasn't intact, I believe it was what was leftover from his dinner?!?! At least, that is what I am hoping for!

I put the fiddler in a small glass container (tea light holder) that is maybe about 2" tall. Enough so the crab cannot escape and bury herself - but the octopus can still grab her easily. I have not seen him go to the glass - but the crab was missing (until I found the shell.)
I waited a day and put another in the glass. She has now been in there for 2 days. Still waiting for action!

Octonaut has a new game - he likes to go to the top of the glass and crawl against the current. Then when he reaches the head, he lets it blow him back slowly and fights against it. He does this over and over again.
He also has one portion of the tank that he seems like like the most and dances for hours.

We have added another set of red LEDs and we can see much better. I will try for some photos soon!
 
These (assuming the Indonesian Macropus) would be really, really high on my favorites list (bear in mind @Neal Whatley says my favorite is whatever is currently in residence :wink:) if they could convert to even a crepuscular schedule. I have only kept two but both were delightful and lived long tank lives.
 
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Yes, it is true he is a true nocturnal. I have found that if I "make it night" right at 8:30 - he will come out within 10 minutes and remain out (for the most part) until I fall asleep watching! :wink: I am glad we decided on our bedroom for the tank, as I get more viewing time.
 
We finally were able to take a few "decent" photos and videos as he has been super interactive all week.
I will try to post the videos in a few!
 

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Here is a video of glass dancing. I put my finger up, to give size reference.
You can see what I call "Sticky Walking" - he seems to do this when he is being timid. He is very capable of moving smoothly and quickly when he wants.

 
And here is a video of him taking the feeding stick from the front glass. This is the first time he has done this. Usually, he has to be holding onto a rock to grab the stick so he can pull it towards him.
This one is a bit blurry, but it's something! :wink:

 
Does Octonaut have a false eyespot near the back of his mantle (both sides)? I looked at the videos several times after noticing what looked like a dark circle and could see it in several of the videos. If it is there and not an artifact of the lighting, then we have not seen this species before.
 
I have seen the false eyespots on the bimacs - and his are not as round. He does have two dark spots towards the tip of his mantle on both sides. When he is in his most common coloring - they are very obvious. They are more oval than the examples I have seen previously. That is exciting! I will try to focus on getting more photos/video that include the spots. Can you guess sex based on the videos?
 
I am assuming we can call these eyespots even though they are in a completely different location from the typical ocellus. I scanned my book (Mark Norman's Cephalopods A World Guide) to see if I could find an octopus with this kind of marking noted as an identification trait but did not come up with anything definite. I did bookmark O. variabilis (pg 299) from the photo only. The spots arenot mentioned but can be almost seen in the one photo and it is thought to be in the macropus complex. However, Norman notes that this is an elongated octopus with arms L1 and R1 bring much longer and thicker than the other arms and as much as twice the length of arms 3 and 4. This does not appear to fit with Octonaut. The 4" mantle listed also seems far too large but we have seen so much variation in sizes of all species that the mantle size could be overlooked but probably not the arm differences.
 
I am searching to see what I can find on O. variabilis and will post a few links for you to review. As you may have found in the past, TONMO is usually the best first source for care and we scan for ceph news daily. Unfortunately, finding official descriptions and well focused photos outside our normally kept animals can be a major challenge.

GENETIC VARIATION IN DIFFERENT POPULATIONS OF OCTOPUS VARIABILIS IN CHINA COASTAL WATERS BASED ON THE COI GENE ANALYSIS The link is to an abstract and not very helpful for ID. It does mention that
Results showed that,compared with other cephalopod species,O.variabilis showed higher genetic diversity
but does not include information about any visual differences in the three populations they identified.

FAO Species Catalog from 1984 Confirms the arm differences and provides an on-line description (no mention of eye spot). Be sure to scroll down to pg 210 as the link does not go directly to the page.

The nautilusLive blog (Nat Geo) shows an unidentified octopus with a similar mantle spot. Unfortunately there is no attempt to ID it.

I don't seem to be getting anywhere positive but will look a bit more.
 
I am looking forward to what we can find! I love the learning and reading aspect - So very exciting. I have not noticed a significance in any arms (except for the re-growth, of course.)
Here is another photo that shows the spots. Its hard to see the shape/color - but it does show placement.
 

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I also looked at the videos carefully and I think in the last video called "more glass dancing" you get a true image of the spots at about the :41 mark on. That appears most similar to what we typically see in him - size, shape & color.
 
I noticed the spots yesterday so I reviewed all the other pictures and videos to see if they were actual spots, just temporary coloration or artifacts from the lighting and thought they appeared to be true spots that might help ID the species. I believe we have a key but now hunting up the species is proving difficult. As you will note as you read many of the scientific abstracts, the first thing that is mentioned is how little is known even about common species :roll:. So far I have not located any animal that mentions the mantle spots (lots of cuttles though :biggrin2:) but they are not a common coloration so it will be somewhere. I might spend a bit of time next week (busy weekend and won't slow down until Tues) looking for text in the FAO pdf. I am still thinking a Macropus complex animal but that is a really generic term for all kinds of shapes and sizes that are nocturnal and red (red being most of the time, all can turn white). Fun stuff and I really enjoy trying to gain ID info.

If you looked at the NatGeo exploration picture I linked, you can see a very clear mantle eyespot (most ocellus are located below the eyes at the top of the webbing). This is a deep water species though and not likely the same.
 

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