Day Octopus

• adaptaciónIt can change its colour, texture and body pattern in under a second to stay hidden as it moves about the sea floor by day.
• It has been documented hunting in collaboration with groupers and other reef fish: the fish points out the hidden prey and the octopus extracts it from the crevice.
• It is semelparous: the female stops feeding while she tends the eggs and dies when the young hatch.
• It can send a wave of colour rippling across its body, the so-called passing cloud, to unsettle crabs and make them move.
• It hunts by day, something uncommon in an octopus, and it does so by spreading the web between its arms like a net over the coral, trapping whatever lies beneath.
• Its colour change is among the fastest and most expressive known: it can alter the pattern, colour and texture of its skin several times a second, and more than a thousand distinct combinations have been documented in a single individual over an hour of hunting.
• Episodes have been observed in which it produces patterns mimicking the dappled light of the reef as it travels, a dynamic camouflage that moves with it.
• It lives little more than a year and is semelparous: it breeds a single time and dies. The female stops eating while she tends the clutch and dies when it hatches.
• It changes den every few days, and the piles of empty shells at the entrance, known as middens, betray its presence and allow its diet to be studied.
• It is one of the main species in the artisanal octopus fisheries of the western Indian Ocean, where temporary area closures have been shown to increase catches substantially.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - no rigid skeleton (mollusc)

Habitat & environment

Coral reefs and shallow rocky bottoms of the Indo-Pacific

Gestation / incubation

20-30 days of egg incubation

Litter / clutch size

From 100,000 to 700,000 eggs in a single spawning

Sources consulted: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus_cyanea