Well, I've been lurking around a bit, and really enjoying the discussion, pics, and vids on this forum.

I've been keeping marine aquariums for about 6 years now, but still no cephs (still not quite ready). When diving, I think I can just stare until I'm about to run out of air, wether it's a Giant Pacific in my own backyard (well, more like 20m from home), or a cuttle in the Philippines, these creatures are SO fascinating!

Anyhow, is there a list somewhere on here that charts out more specs on individual octos? It'd be nice to see them to better help people pick exactly what fits their wants/needs. Like max size, best temperatures, likelihood of diurnalism, and average lifespan. Maybe it's on this site already, but after LOTS of searching, I couldn't find it.

These specific names are kinda tricky! Briuaius, Vulgaris, etc etc. ha!

Joe

Hi Joe, welcome to TONMO.

It would be nice to have a detailed profile on each of the different species available for the hobbyist. Unfortunately most of the time when purchasing an octopus you just get whatever you get because the people collecting and selling them often refer to them as "Common Octopus", "Common Brown Octopus", "Common Pacific Octopus" and don't know what species they are selling, not to mention many octopuses have very similar appearances and color is not a good identification feature most of the time.

Researching them by specific species names will help you find what you're looking for. Much more so than any common octopus name in my opinion.

:welcome: Joe! I think that's a great idea... maybe we can get a species overview in the articles. I think some of the octo care ones give something of an overview, but it's a bit dated: we're seeing several species a lot now that were pretty rare a few years back, like aculeatus and hummelinki, and we know a lot more about mercatoris at this point, too... and "octopus sp. 11" or whatever number it was called, although I don't know that we should recommend keeping an octo that hasn't even been classified yet, it seemed to make a good pet, so it would be useful to help ID any than show up in the trade.

:welcome:

:welcome: to Tonmo!

Tony,
I took the website name, octopusid with the hopes of learning enough to create a database with features and photos of the various identifying markings. It was a grand idea for a novice only kept a hitch hiker some 40+ years ago for roughly 15 minutes :oops:. I would still like to eventually put something together and have better knowledge but right now I don't have the time (and still lack a lot of the knowledge) but if we start a thread with the idea of including photos of distinguishing arms, eyes, eye spots etc. maybe there will be enough over a period of time to help create that database. It would be helpful if contributors would provide a permissions statement to release any photos for this purpose.

:welcome: