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Squid

Common Octopus

Octopus vulgaris

Octopus vulgaris Cuvier, 1797 · Octopodidae WoRMS 140605

Reference photos

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Warty skin and thick, stout arms, its colour shifting through grey, yellow, brown and green to suit the situation. Each arm carries TWO rows of suckers, against the single row of the curled octopus (Eledone cirrhosa). Dens by day in a crevice in a rocky reef or a hole worked into softer sediment, and is active mainly at night. In Britain it reaches its north-eastern limit in the southwest and the western English Channel.

Depth

Shoreline to 250 m, typically shallower than 100 m

Size

Total length to 1.3-1.8 m; mantle length to 40 cm, commonly around 25 cm; weight to over 20 kg

Habitat

Intertidal to shallow subtidal on the continental shelf, over rocky, sandy or muddy ground

Behaviour

Mainly night active, spending daylight hours in a den in a rock crevice or dug into soft sediment

Diet

I eat

  • Crustaceans, especially crabs and lobsters
  • Shelled molluscs, drilled open through the shell to reach the animal inside
  • Fish, when it can catch them, and polychaete worms

Eats me

  • Fish, including groupers, wrasses and eels, as well as sharks
  • Marine mammals, especially dolphins and seals
  • Other cephalopods, including its own species; cannibalism is recorded

Where you'd find it

Mostly seen in the English Channel, and only here and there elsewhere.

ChannelCeltic SeaNorth SeaIrish SeaW of IrelandW of Scotland
Often seenNow and thenWhere 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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