My cuttlefish just laid eggs!!

MrThate

New member
So me and my roommate are both posting on tonmo about this, but tonmo is pretty...dead. so im just gonna copy and paste what we wrote to save time: Some questions.

Jason: Ok i need any and all info on what i need for the baby cuttles. My cuttlefish just layed her eggs sometime between 2 A.M. 8 Jan 2010 and 12 P.M. I first need to find out how long it takes for them to hatch, what the likely hood of their survival is, a good food for them to be feed, what i need to do to keep them safe in the tank, and the growth rate for a dwarf cuttlefish is. pretty much any info you can give me will be greatly appreciated! thank you in advance

P.S. if you need any info about my tank just let me know and i will be more than happy to tell you.



Mason (me): so pertaining to the same cuttlefish i had some questions myself. How long can they hold on to sperm sacks? we've had her exactly a month and 7 days today and we found the eggs yesterday morning.. We're looking into buying all the supplies we need, and finding a place for our carnivorous fish (i.e. lionfish) to stay until we can find a good leeway for our baby cuttles. But we want to know if there's actually a chance or possibility they'll hatch before we go into spending all of that money (that we dont have, thanks Navy!). We cant look inside them to see if there are any embryos because Zoidberg filled them with ink, and maybe it's just my human mind arguing with a cephalopods instinctive nature, but i dont think that she would take all of this care of these eggs...if there was nothing inside them, she even burrows under them to sleep. I've found no consistency on any of these things online, so its possible that no one knows for sure.. After our wunderpus died, we cant go through losing zoidberg too, these eggs are a big deal to us haha.

any questions just ask, and any and all help would be greatly appreciated
 
Also, I'll get pictures up when i get home from work, I'd put some up now, but my phone fell into a bucket of saltwater my roommate'd just made last night so i had to buy a new one
 
Also, I'll get pictures up when i get home from work, I'd put some up now, but my phone fell into a bucket of saltwater my roommate'd just made last night so i had to buy a new one

Let me guess. You had the phone in your shirt pocket and when you bent down it fell in!
 
Your biggest problem will be food. The best thing for hatchlings is mysid shrimp (live). Lots of em. It took about two days for my newborn to go through fifty of them. They eat like crazy and if more than one egg hatches your going to need hundreds of live mysid shrimp. I was only able to acquire mine online. If it is a S. bandensis, it won't grow very large quickly but that doesn't mean they have a small appetite. The first couple of days after they have depleted their yoke sac they will have a difficult time trying to catch live food. They seem to go through a learning curve and gain accuracy with experience. Don't be alarmed if they haven't caught anything for a few days. They will eventually learn to catch the shrimp. Most people keep newborns in those breeder fish nets but I kept mine in a plastic breeder container with good results. I'm not sure the survival rate or hatching success since I bought my cuttle the day after it was born. One thing I learned the hard way is to not move the egg clutch to another tank, they seem to be sensitive to environmental changes because I bought an egg clutch and none hatched even though another similar clutch hatched (from the same parent) at the lfs with 100% success. I'm sorry to say that the mother will most likely die soon if she is similar to most cephalopods but I could be wrong on that. Thales can give you really good advice and should be able to correct/add to my reply. Good luck!
 
It is common for some of the eggs to be duds - even the wild caught ones.
S. bandensis doesn't die after laying eggs. They can start laying as early as 5 or 6 months and can continue for about 4 or 5 months. They tend to stop and live for several more months before the end of their lives.
 
i've been trying for the longest time to find an LFS that has cuttlefish. I live in south florida, has anyone seen them or even a place online that is willing to ship them to me. i understand that they are extremely fragile and more than likely don't survive the shipping. thats why i am looking for an LFS that carries them, but i'm not ruling any option out just yet.
 
i've been trying for the longest time to find an LFS that has cuttlefish. I live in south florida, has anyone seen them or even a place online that is willing to ship them to me. i understand that they are extremely fragile and more than likely don't survive the shipping. thats why i am looking for an LFS that carries them, but i'm not ruling any option out just yet.

The eggs will ship alot better and are probably easier to find. I bought eggs around this time last year. The hard part is having the right food for the newborns.
 
cant wait to see pics. byw im in the navy and i get paid good, but i have been in 9 years, im guessing since yall live together yall havent been in long. looking forward to updates
 
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