Arms six times the body, held out stiff in a posture that reads as a sea snake.
A small-bodied octopus with a mantle of about 8 cm and arms up to six times that length — the most extreme arm-to-body ratio of the octopus a diver meets on soft sediment. Colour is a plain sandy brown to grey, usually with fine darker mottling and none of the bold patterning of the mimic or the wunderpus. The body is small enough that a moving animal reads as arms alone.
It is one of the species included in the discussion of octopus mimicry: individuals have been recorded holding six arms tucked away and extending two in a stiff, undulating line across the bottom, a posture described as flatfish or sea-snake imitation, and reported in the Caribbean congener as well. It is a genuine observed behaviour and an unproven interpretation, which is the honest state of most claims in this area. Buries into silt at the first serious disturbance and can vanish completely in a few seconds. Recorded from about 3 to 40 m, mainly at night.
Older references list it as Octopus defilippi.
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.
