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Squid

Curled Octopus

Eledone cirrhosa

Eledone cirrhosa (Lamarck, 1798) · Eledonidae WoRMS 140600

Reference photos

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A broad, ovoid body and eight moderately short arms, curled when at rest, each with a single row of suckers (the common octopus has two rows). Orange to red-brown above, white below. Found on all British and Irish coasts, abundant off Scotland.

Depth

0 to 700 m, with most catches between 50 and 300 m

Size

Up to about 55 cm total length, mantle to 250 mm, and about 1.2 kg

Habitat

Rocky coasts from the lower shore into the sublittoral, and soft bottoms over a wide depth range

Behaviour

In aquaria, largely sedentary in dens or among rocks, long quiet spells broken by bouts of activity and hunting; also buries itself in sand

Diet

I eat

  • Decapod crustaceans, mostly crabs and snapping shrimps, hunted as an active predator
  • Fish, other cephalopods, gastropods and brittlestars, and sometimes its own kind
  • Crabs, opened by drilling a hole through the carapace or puncturing an eye

Eats me

  • Seals, both grey and harbour; an important part of the harbour seal's summer diet in some years
  • Fish, from cod, ling and monkfish to dogfish and rays
  • Toothed whales, including bottlenose dolphins and harbour porpoises

Where you'd find it

Found all around Britain and Ireland, so you have a chance of seeing it anywhere on the coast.

ChannelCeltic SeaNorth SeaIrish SeaW of IrelandW of Scotland
Often seenWhere PEBL filmsBased on marine survey records (OBIS). Blank seas can mean nobody has looked there, not that the animal is absent.

Sources

Open-access references behind this page. Every statement on this page was read out of one of them; anything that could not be traced to a source was taken off the page rather than left standing. Each link was checked on the date shown, and confirmed then to be about this species.

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