name that cephalopod

[mucktopus]

I'll post more pieces of the puzzle and other angles, but have fun with this one for now.

 

[mucktopus]

ok last pic...

 

[cuttlegirl]

Ok, so not S. mestus, I'm going to to with S. plangon.

 

[OB]

Given the amount of possible differences in colouration, anything goes, really S. plangon does have these two distinct "horns" on its posterior mantle, visible in the second pic, so...

 

[OB]

PS: S. latimanus also appears to show the bright yellow green surrounding the eyes.

 

[Thales]

It's not a smallish latimanus, is it?

The one in the vid? Yep.

 

[OB]

I thought so, thanks for the thumbs up

 

[DWhatley]

This looks like the eye but no ID

 

[OB]

That one's officinalis

 

[mucktopus]

You're all very good at this! Ok- so this one was a bit of a trick question. It could be something that is occasionally called mesteus, it could be undescribed, or it could be something more obscure. It is not latimanus or apama though (arms are different, and females reach only about 100 mm ML). I'm trying to look into it more, but so far have come up empty. It doesn't help that FAO simply doesn't have records for many regions in Indonesia (no fault of FAO there)- we have our work cut out for us!

 

[DWhatley]

I think is it OK to cheat at this game (both contestants and author). I am still crawling with octopuses so cuttles and squid have not been a focus but learning to SEE the differences in the animals is universal to IDing any of them. I will have to admit I gave up on this as I could not find anything with those odd little arms - at least I noticed them. With the suggested name, I did find this photographic source that may come in handy NEXT time. The eye in the mystery cuttle seems to make a sideways S rather than a distinct W but that could be photo angle as there are two on this site of the same cuttle and the W looks like an S in the second photo.

They also have octo and squid photo id's that may be useful in the future because they present multiple photos of the individuals. Be sure to scroll down past the blank area as the octo one looks like it only containes blue ring photos.

The site has a small set of collections of non-ceph photos to aid in diver's id's as well.