Meet the Family

Below we have the species that have been attributed to the family Octpoteuthidae. Much revision has taken place, though much more is needed to get a real sense of which species are valid and their relationship to each other.

In the genus Octopoteuthis, so far we have O. longiptera being designated nomen dubium (invalid), so we’ll just cross that one off the list. Following its description, O. persica was found to actually just be a paralarva of Taningia, so we’ll cross that one off as well. That leaves us with 7 nominal species of Octopoteuthis: danae, deletron, indica, megaptera, neilseni, rugosa, and sicula (with sicula also being the type species of the genus). The genus Taningia comprises one species, Taningia danae, making it necessarily the type of the genus. T. danae is also known as the “world’s biggest flasher” (*snicker*) due to its large photophores borne on arm pair II.