The Octopod Ocythoe in California 
S. S. BERRY 
In the course of my review of the West American cephalopods 
published a few years ago (Bulletin Bureau Fisheries, v. 30, p. 
275), I wrote of a well known group of pelagic Octopoda as fol- 
lows: 
“No other group at all approaches Argonauta in its assemblage 
of utterly distinctive characters, the nearest being the genera 
Ocythoe and Tremoctopus, which are not known to be represented in 
our waters.” 
That Ocythoe, at least, is a member of our fauna, I have long 
suspected, partly because of a specimen which was exhibited in one 
of the Los Angeles curio stores some years since, but ignorantly held 
at so inflated a figure, that it could not be obtained even for one of 
the university museums, and another without label, but thought to 
be from Southern California, which is now in the collection of the 
State University at Berkeley. A further bit of evidence, which to 
me savors strongly of this same animal, lies in a paragraph by the 
late Dr. C. F. Holder with regard to a specimen obtained by him 
at Avalon (Scientific American, October 16, 1909, p. 283). He 
wrote: 
“Tt is given in all the textbooks, I believe, that the male of the 
argonaut is a minute animal hardly an inch long. This cannot be 
so in all species. I have a male which has a radiant spread of eight 
or nine inches, and is as large as the female. . . . The male 
of this species is large, and might readily be taken for an octopus, 
having its habits.” 
As a male Argonauta answering such a description as this would 
be a sheer absurdity, the lines quoted served at first to occasion me 
no little perplexity. Surely, however, the suggestion that Holder’s 
specimen was a female Ocythoe and not an Argonauta at all, seems 
not only possible, but plausible. 
These cases are all strong indications that Ocythoe belongs to our 
fauna but, in view of the obvious uncertainty attending each, no 
formal record of the fact has yet found its way into print. 
