The Widespread Distribution of the Venomous and Poisonous Blue-lined Octopus Hapalochlaena spp., in the East/Japan Sea: Possible Effects of Sea Warming

The geographical distribution of the toxic blue-lined octopus (commonly known as the blue-ringed octopus), Hapalochlaena spp., around the East/Japan Sea was investigated. Observation records of the octopus were gathered using commercial search engines on the Internet. A questionnaire to complement and enhance the base data was conducted that targeted fishermen from areas where the octopus was most likely to occur, i.e., the southeast coast and islands of Korea in the East/Japan Sea. Overall, 32 observational records of the blue-lined octopus were found from Korea and Japan. In Korea, only one record, from 2003, was found on a website; none of the 240 fishermen who participated in the questionnaire reported seeing blue-lined octopus. However, a total of 31 observations of the blue-lined octopus from 2004 to July 2010 were found from 17 different regions in the East/Japan Sea and neighboring waters in Japan. Twenty-two cases were from coastal Honshu Island, and nine were from the west coast of Kyushu Island, Japan. The northern distributional boundary of the blue-lined octopus on the Japanese coast was off Fukui Prefecture around latitude $36^{\circ}$10' N. Our results indicate that the blue-lined octopus is distributed extensively along the Japanese coast, at a low frequency, in the East/Japan Sea.