A shallow sand octopus, marbled brown and cream, that buries rather than taking a hole.
An octopus with a mantle to about 8 cm and arms roughly two to three times that length, brown marbled with cream and grey, the mantle often showing a paler saddle and the arms faintly banded. The web is shallow and the suckers run in two rows. It is a soft-bottom animal, found on sand and mud rather than on rock, and it buries into the sediment instead of taking a hole.
The coconut octopus shares the same ground and is the usual confusion. That animal has dark branching lines over a paler ground and frequently carries a shell or a coconut half; this one does neither. Feeding is on crabs and small bivalves taken from the sediment, and most sightings come at night or in the last light of an afternoon dive.
Recorded from the shallows to about 20 m.
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.
