The smallest octopus described, and small enough that most divers pass over it.
An octopus with a mantle around a centimetre and a total length under about 2.5 cm, weighing well under a gram, which makes it the smallest octopus so far described. Colour is red-brown to orange, often paler and mottled, and the arms are short relative to the body. The character that names it is on the suckers: the rims of the suckers towards the arm tips carry a fringe of small papillae, which gives each sucker a star-like outline. That is not a field character at normal viewing distance. In practice the animal is separated from small Abdopus and Amphioctopus by size, on the reasoning that a fully formed octopus at this size is more likely to be this species than a juvenile of a larger one, and the reasoning is not reliable without a close look at the suckers.
Recorded from the western Pacific in shallow water, roughly 3 to 30 m, on rubble, shell debris and the margins of coral. It shelters in empty shells, bottle tops, lengths of tubing and holes in rubble in the same way as the larger sand octopuses, so it is turned up by attention to the smallest available cavity rather than by searching open sand. Photographing it is a question of magnification: at two centimetres across, the working distance and depth of field are those of a nudibranch frame rather than a cephalopod one.
Its diet, breeding and daily activity pattern are not well described in the literature. Most of what circulates about the species comes from dive photographs rather than from published work, and the record is thin enough that the activity given here should be read as a working assumption.
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.
