A three-centimetre sausage that spends the day buried and comes up at night.
A tiny cephalopod to about 4 cm, the mantle rounded and blunt at the rear with two small fins set well back — a shape closer to a sausage than to a squid. Ground colour is translucent cream to pink, dusted with dark chromatophores that the animal fires in patches, and the whole body has a slightly glassy look. The bobtail squid Euprymna is the animal it is most often confused with; a bobtail is rounder, its fins are set higher on the mantle, and it carries a light organ that the bottletail lacks.
Spends the day buried in soft sediment with a coating of sand held on the skin by mucus, and emerges after dark to hunt small crustaceans in the water just above the bottom. It swims with a slow flapping of the fins rather than by jetting, and hangs almost stationary while doing it. Recorded from about 3 to 25 m. A night-dive animal found by sweeping a light low across open silt, and one that will settle again within a metre or two if it is not chased.
Older references list it as Sepiadarium kochi.
Ratings are per location: 1 means found on most dives that look for it, 5 means a handful of records. Where enough dives have been logged the figure is calculated from them; otherwise it is an editorial estimate, and says so. We publish habitat and destination, not the dive site.
