A new species of pygmy Paroctopus (Cephalopoda: Octopodidae): the smallest southwestern Atlantic octopod, found in sea debris Tatiana S. Leite (
[email protected] ) Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina Centro de Ciencias Biologicas https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9117-9648 Erica A.G. Vidal Universidade Federal do Parana Setor de Ciencias da Terra Françoise Dantas Lima Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte Centro de Biociencias Sergio M.Q. Lima Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte Centro de Biociencias Ricardo M Dias Universidade Federal do Sul da Bahia Giulia A. Giuberti Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro Davi De Vasconcellos Universidade Federal do Rio Grande Jennifer A. Mather University of Lethbridge Manuel Haimovici Universidade Federal do Rio Grande Original Paper Keywords: Paroctopus, octopus Posted Date: January 29th, 2021 DOI: https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-172910/v1 License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Read Full License Version of Record: A version of this preprint was published at Marine Biodiversity on July 27th, 2021. See the published version at https://doi.org/10.1007/s12526-021-01201-z. Loading [MathJax]/jax/output/CommonHTML/fonts/TeX/fontdata.js Page 1/27 Abstract The new species, Paroctopus cthulu sp. nov. Leite, Haimovici, Lima and Lima, was recorded from very shallow coastal waters on sandy/muddy and shelter- poor bottoms with natural and human-origin debris. It is a small octopus, adults are less than 35 mm mantle length (ML) and weigh around 15 g. It has short to medium sized arms, enlarged suckers on the arms of both males and females, large posterior salivary glands (25 %ML), a relatively large beak (9 % ML) and medium to large mature eggs (3.5 to > 9 mm).