It appears that there are at least two pairs of species of octopus that share the same territory, look almost identical, yet have one large-egged and one small-egged species, I'm thinking bimaculatus vs bimaculoides and joubini vs mercatoris in particular. I can't remember if there's a small-egged blue-ring species as well.

This strikes me as rather weird. I wonder if there's some sort of developmental or regulatory or environmental switch for this, or some sort of weird selection pressure that favors this, or something. This is probably partially because I'm taking a class in the gene regulatory networks that control embryonic development and their evolutionary implications, but I think it's an interesting question regardless.

Have I mentioned recently that we need an octopus genome project (and a squid genome project, and a spirula genome project, and a nautilus genome project, and an argonaut genome project, and a vampyroteuthis genome project...)?

While I was out on Catalina I stated a project to possibly look into this, but because I moved was not able to complete it.

While I was out on Catalina I stated a project to possibly look into this, but because I moved was not able to complete it.

Yeah, I remember we talked about this a bit when we went to the aquarium...