Monty - Unknown (brown eyespot Caribbean)

[tonmo]

Still very nice photos, and such interesting behavior... thanks D.

 

[DWhatley]

I have pretty much decided that I have no clue what species Monty is. His eyespot looks nothing like the others we have called hummelincki (he may actually be hummelincki from some of the descriptions I have read and the others something else). His coloration in the open is entirely different (but he can change to colors like the others). However, his arm to mantle ratio, his quick tapering arms, a distinct spot over the eye that I have noted on others all fit the bill.

He dances like he wants to play several times a day but tonight was the first time he has played for an hour. I was the one to quit, he never gave the signal for me to leave and I kept waiting for it because I wanted a video. Note that he never flashes his eyespots, something he definitely does when startled or annoyed. He did show a slight darkening with a line on the eyes (also a common marking) a couple times but still came back for more. I took a lot of video and will only keep you entertained with two of them (I also deleted a bunch but kept others that I did not upload).

You may want to skip the second one if you are prone to sea sickness. He is afraid of my floor standing tripod so I have to hand hold the camera. I was trying to operate the camera with my left hand (camera's are right handed), watch Monty, watch the monitor and play with him with my right hand. An extra couple of limbs would have been helpful.

 

[Cephdoc]

Hey Dwhatley! I really enjoyed reading all about this little guy! I cant wait till i cant start having cephs! Im so jealous watching thes videos and reading about them! I love it! How well do you have the tanks octo proofed?

 

[Hajar]

Very very sweet. That looks like a trusting relationship.

 

[DWhatley]

Cephdoc, The octo tanks have acrylic tops with hinges and hasp style acrylic latches. Monty's tank is cobbled together from donations and scavaging so the top is a bit crude (we cut up a top we built for a tank that was later upgraded) but functional. My preference is to have the larger lip around the tank that comes by default with most acrylics (this is a glass tank) as I find both lowering the water level and extending the top edge are very effective. I think I may have pointed you to Monty's tank build out thread but when I looked to provide a link I found that I had not included the top (now corrected) in the thread.

Hajar, as you are learning with Ramses, trust has to be devloped both ways. I have to trust that he won't decide to bite and he has to be confident that I won't remove an arm or worse. When I have an octopus that shows potential for this kind of interaction (and many do not or I fail to figure it out but I have had four others that would come to be petted and an additional merc that would play to some extent) my first goal is to establish a way for it to tell me to remove my hand from the tank. Surprisingly, this is not hard and is rapidly learned. I was hoping to video Monty's "signal" last night but I gave up before he did (with a totally pruned hand).

Neal laughs at me when I mention it but I think Monty may be the most intelligent octo I have kept and I am trying to think of an interesting experiement. I have pretty much decided using food is not going to work (and likely won't work with most home kept animals if my theory is correct) so he has to volunteer to participate and I have to come up with something that can actually show a result. Non-food ideas are solicited!

 

[DWhatley]

A few of Monty's color variations. Unfortunately, I took 40 photos and kept 7. I did not get what I was trying to capture in any of them. Either Monty moves (usually) or I wiggle the camera or he does not display the markings I want to put on his ID thread. The closest species I find to his size and sometimes coloration is O. rubescens, a Pacific cold water species. He is the first octopus we have had that will show light pink all over. In a few of his first photos, you can see that he could turn a true red (not a brown red, more the color of a red ball or tree sponge). He also has a full range of browns and of course this yellow gold. He can raise bright white spots along his arms and his eye spot usualy looks like a small black disk when he decides he is POed. Twice I have seen it look blue for a fraction of a second but I don't know if that is just the lighting. I keep thinking I have seen him somewhere but I have been through Mark Norman's book over and over again and nothing in the Caribbean is close. I am quite sure he will remain small as his growth rate has slowed considerably.

He remains a really picky eater. He will not take anything that does not have a shell and he will only keep and eat food when he decides it is supper time. If he is not ready to eat, he will take the offering and the drop it. If we pick it up AND he decides it is time to eat he will accept it if we put it right up to his beak. Even live food will be left alone until his internal dinner bell chimes. The one exception seems to be crawfish but he only gets one every week or every other week. All that being said, he does eat (eventually) daily. One of the oddities we are trying to monitor is to see if he is eating some of the shell. I don't find near as much shell as goes into the the tank. It is possible that one of the serpents eat some of it but I have not known them to do so.

After posting, I noticed that I did manage to get the three cirri that fringe the bottom of his eyes. The third pictures shows them with the most dimension. These are always displayed and should be a species diagnostic trait.

The last photo (I get 4 per post ) is my interpretation of Monty mimicing an owl but I wish he had been doing his horned owl impersonation . He will often have just one eye horn raised toward the glass (as in this photo if you look really closely). He seems to show them in two distinctly different heights. The longest has two branches and the shorter only one.

 

[SabrinaR]

He looks so cute. Hes showing you whose boss it would seem.

I am glad he handled the transfer and seems to be adjusting well.

 

[DWhatley]

I observed Monty doing something I have not noticed other octopuses doing before. I don't know if it is an observational fault or unusual. After eating most of the crab in the photos below, he was playing with my hand and would extend the tips of his arms down into the sand and explore (I have see this). When he came up with a crab leg he positioned himself to be able to loop it in the very tip of the arm and then place the food directly into the beak. What I found unusual was that he put it in his mouth using the arm tips like fingers. He did not move the food up the arm with his suckers (as I would expect). His arms taper quickly and maybe as much as half the arms are very thin with very small suckers so this may explain the action and may be common in others with this arm structure. Hopefully I can get a video in the near future (I wish he was not so terrified of the tripod , it is very difficult to take pictures with my left hand and the videos I do take are prone to courting sea sickness).

It also appears that he has designated the left side of the tank as his play ground and the right side as his feeding area. During the day, he is active on the left wall only. When Neal comes home (Neal feeds him), he comes out and stays on the right wall until he is fed. After he eats he choses the left wall for activity again. I wanted to establish a separate eating and playing area but he has reversed my intent (best photos can be taken on the right and I could hold the camera in my right hand).

Note his webbing in the last photo. It is very delicate looking and always shows the small white dots. It runs the entire length of the arm. The lines in the webbing are interesting and I wonder if they have something to do with expansion and contraction and if all webbing has the same type of line pattern.

 

[Level_Head]

Interesting! Perhaps Monty's kind is destined to evolve in favor of the use of dexterous armtips. He's certainly a colorful character.

 

[iAlex]

I sure would love to have an O. IHaveNoClue... xD

 

[skywindsurfer]

As for the yellow/gold coloration, my O. Hummelincki (Bubbles) has not fully turned her entire body that color, but she has turned her arms and most often the tips when she was younger. Here's a short video that shows that.

Can you give an accurate messurment of the arms and mantel?

Also on a side note. I've noticed the area just below the eyes/mantel and above the legs being very sharp or pronounced, unlike my O. Hummelincki. It starts narrow near the base of the eyes and getting slightly wider as it reaches the legs but it stays narrow. This area on my octopus is almost always thick. Do you have any ideas on this? I've only kept one so I'm sure that you'd have better input since you've kept multiple.

 

[DWhatley]

I have Kara on the look out for more O. IHaveNoClue octos but I am hoping to get enough pictures of diagnostic traits to reopen his ID thread and then "poke" a few people for some suggestions . If this animal turned out to have large eggs, it would be ideal for aquaculturing.

I am convinced that Monty is not the same species we have been calling O.hummelincki. What I am not sure of is whether or not Monty is O.hummelincki, O.filosus (considered synonyms but now I wonder) or something altogether different. The descriptions come from pickled specimens and so much is not present after they have been in formaldayde. Even the eyespot descriptions are not definitive in the descriptions I can find. The only other ocellate octopus I can find from the Caribbean is only know in Mexico, looks like and is the size of a vulgaris (O. Maya) and Monty is definitely not that species either.

 

[skywindsurfer]

Ya I'm aware of the O. Maya population. I've tried to dig up as much information I could about them, but most of the information that I find is in spanish. Could it be possible for a species that is most commonly found around the Yucatan Peninsula make it's way to the central Caribbean Islands and even into the Northern Gulf of Mexico? I'm not saying that Monty is an O. Maya, I just finished going through your journal and a few of the traights (aside from his small stature) caught my eye as being similar. The post (I don't remember off the top of my head who posted it) about inter breading between the different Hummelincki subspecies is interesting. Do you think there is anything to this?

 

[DWhatley]

Neal is convince we are seeing interbreeding (he has no biology background) but the fact is very little study has been done with octopuses for a very long time and they are only becoming popular again in recent years (both to the public and to science). You will note that most studies are dated back in the thirties or earlier. Needless to say, we don't really know how many species there are and we don't know which are indiginous and which are invasive.

I am sure Monty is not O. maya (and there are no similarities other than an undescribed eye spot). I find it odd we don't see them though as they are hearty, have been successfully raised in lab aquariums and are found in large numbers, enough to be an important food item and to consider aquaculturing them. I have often wondered why we don't see many Mexican imports in the aquarium industry and suspect a political issue is part of the answer. There are quite a few articles on the recent project to raise them as food but I have not seen much else. Should you find articles, please start a thread with links in the Cephalopod Species->Octopodidae forum

 

[skywindsurfer]

I have a co-worker that has contacts in the Yucatan Peninsula area that I've asked to see if he can contact a labratory and see if they would be able to ship some animals to us but I've had little success there. About the articles, would you like me to post them even if they are in spanish?