FAQ
A contribution of The Cephalopod Page
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Hi there Dr. Wood, My name is Regina and I have a son who is only 5, but so very interested in cephalopods. He knows quite a bit about them through reading books acquired through the libraries and watching TLC and Discovery Channel. We were wondering about the Argonaut octopus. Where does this magnificently weird octopus species live? |
| Answer: |
| Please take a look here. If you click on the distribution link you will see where scientists have collected the species. Basically they are found all over the world! You can also go to the CephBase Species Search. Type in "arg" in the genus field to see what data CephBase has on other species of argonauts. The fact that it can grow shells is really quite amazing. What kind of info do you have on it? Not too much - only the females have "shells" which are egg cases, the males are much smaller. Almost all the information on these cephs is in that tiny paragraph on my TCP website. You can tell your son that there will still be plenty to learn a bout them by the time he is my age - encouragement if he wants to be a marine biologist. Have you ever studied such a creature? Are they rare? No and no. Well, things aren't that black and white. What do you mean by rare? Do you mean that there aren't many of them or do you mean that they are difficult to find or get? These are open ocean cephalopods - probably not extremely rare but they live in offshore areas and are understudied. I did my thesis on deep-sea octopuses. Are they rare? Most probably they are not, but they are rare to scientists. I have a special interest in these cephalopods but they don't show up frequently and no one has been able to keep them alive for more than a few weeks. I have not worked on them, but would like to. Dr. James Wood |