A striking red octopus scattered with round white spots, with a first pair of arms far longer than the rest - up to a meter (3 ft) against a mantle of 20 cm (8 in). The red intensifies when the animal is disturbed, which is a warning rather than camouflage, and makes it one of the few octopuses that is easier to see when it wants to be.
It hunts by feel, at night, in coral. The long arms are pushed deep into branching Acropora and Stylophora heads to flush small fish and crustaceans out of the branches, working one head at a time. The prey that escapes the arms comes out into open water, which is where the accomplices are waiting.
Those accomplices are fish. Groupers, goatfish and wrasses follow this octopus through the night and take what it drives out, and the association is stable enough that a diver can find the octopus by following the fish. This is one of the best-studied cases of interspecies hunting on a coral reef, and the octopus tolerates rather than benefits from it.
By day it is gone: buried in sand or wedged into rubble, with only the mantle edge showing. Like the rest of its family it breeds once and dies, the female starving beside her eggs.
- brick red with round white spots over body and arms
- first pair of arms far longer than the rest, to about a meter
- hunting coral heads at night with a following of groupers and wrasses
- mantle to 20 cm
Why it's threatened
The threats to this species are currently unknown, although it may be suffering from fishing, at least in parts of its range.
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
