The green octopus is the octopus most caught on Mexico’s Pacific coast and in the Gulf of California, and Baja California Sur lands more octopus than any other Pacific state. It lives about a year and a half to two years, hunts at night and spends the day tucked into the rocks.
A medium-sized octopus with a rounded mantle and eight tapering arms. Its color runs from light to dark brown, green or reddish, and it can change color, pattern and skin texture in an instant. Unlike the two-spot octopuses, it has no ocelli, the dark eyespots that some relatives carry below each eye.
Hubbs’ octopus lives on rocky bottoms and reefs from the intertidal down to about 30 m, from the Pacific coast of Baja California Sur through the Gulf of California to Oaxaca. It is a warm-water species: south of Bahía Magdalena it replaces the two-spot octopus, which prefers the cooler water of the California Current. Museum collections hold specimens from Bahía San Lucas, Cabeza Ballena and Los Frailes, and divers at Cabo Pulmo still photograph it.
It is a nocturnal, opportunistic predator whose diet is mostly crabs; in octopus from Santa Rosalía and La Paz Bay, crustaceans made up most of what they ate, and some had eaten other green octopus. Its life is short: females lay tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of small eggs in rocky holes and guard them, and after reproduction both sexes die. The tiny hatchlings, called paralarvae, drift in the plankton for an estimated 60 days before settling on the bottom.
At Isla Espíritu Santo, off La Paz, female green octopus held a mean of 205,144 developing eggs each, with a range of about 127,000 to 327,000. The main spawning season there was autumn, with the sea at 24 to 29 °C.
Source ↗In Oaxaca, divers found females moving from deeper water to the coast to lay their eggs, from late May to September at 10 to 15 m, hung in clusters inside rocky holes and wrapped in a gelatinous sheath. That is also when the fishery catches the most octopus.
Source ↗Even cut away from the body, skin of the California two-spot octopus, a Baja relative, expanded its color cells when lit, fastest under blue light. It uses the same light-sensing protein as the octopus eye, so octopus skin may sense light on its own.
Source ↗The first octopus genome, from the California two-spot octopus, described a nervous system of nearly half a billion neurons, more than six times as many as a mouse brain. It held 168 protocadherin genes, a gene family linked to building neurons, against 17 to 25 in other mollusks.
Source ↗Whole-genome data from 67 octopus sampled from Mexico to Peru split green octopus and Peru’s Octopus mimus into warm and cold lineages. El Niño events let the two meet and interbreed, leaving them in what the authors call a gray zone of speciation.
Source ↗In 73 green octopus from four Mexican Pacific sites, including Santa Rosalía and La Paz Bay, crustaceans made up 73.6% to 91.8% of the diet, mainly small crabs. Some octopus also ate fish or worms, and the cephalopods in their stomachs included other green octopus.
Source ↗In Baja California Sur octopus is a small-boat commercial fishery. On the Pacific coast, pangas set traps; in the Gulf of California, divers breathing air from a compressor (hookah) pull octopus from their holes with a metal hook. Mexico’s fishery chart lists 458 boats authorized for octopus in Baja California Sur. Sport anglers and spearfishers may not take octopus at all: under Mexican rules, squid is the only mollusk they can keep.
Around Los Cabos you are more likely to meet one with a mask than on a line. Green octopus hunts at night, so by day snorkelers and divers usually find it wedged into a crevice, watching, or see it flash through color changes when it moves. Inside Cabo Pulmo National Park, where most iNaturalist sightings near Cabo come from, commercial fishing is banned. Look, don’t grab: octopus bite with a hard beak.
Green octopus is the octopus served across Baja California Sur, mostly from local traps and hookah divers. Baja California Sur has no closed season or minimum size for octopus; Mexico’s only Pacific octopus closure is in Bahía de los Ángeles, Baja California, where green octopus is closed September 1 to November 30. In a study of octopus from metal-polluted Santa Rosalía, the mantle, the part people eat, stayed within international limits for human consumption.
| Sport fishing (NOM-017-PESC-1994, 2013 update) | Octopus may not be taken; squid is the only mollusk anglers may keep |
|---|---|
| Spearfishing | Fish only; hooks and gaffs are not allowed underwater |
| Commercial fishery | Permit required; traps on the Pacific coast, hookah diving with a hook in the Gulf |
| Closed season and minimum size in BCS | None; Mexico’s only Pacific octopus closure is in Bahía de los Ángeles, BC |
| Cabo Pulmo National Park | Commercial fishing banned; sport fishing catch-and-release only |
| Mexico (NOM-059) | Not listed |
| IUCN Red List | Least Concern (2016) |
The two-spot octopus (Octopus bimaculatus) has a dark eyespot below each eye and is caught mainly in Baja California and Sonora; the green octopus has no eyespots. Museum collections from off Cabo also hold Octopus veligero and Octopus penicillifer, and even experts struggle to tell octopus apart underwater because they change color, pattern and shape.
Not as a sport angler or spearfisher. Mexican sport fishing rules allow squid as the only mollusk; octopus is caught by commercial fishermen with permits.
Snorkeling or diving on rocky reefs. Most recent sightings near Cabo come from Cabo Pulmo and Los Frailes, and museum specimens have been collected in Bahía San Lucas. By day they hide in crevices; they hunt at night.
The green octopus lives only about 1.5 to 2 years. After reproducing, both males and females die.
Top illustration: Top Anglers. Photos: iNaturalist contributors, credited on each photo.
Pangas and small boats that work the beaches, points and rocky reefs. From $453 with license included.
