O.mercatoris baby

cephalopoder

cephalopoder

Premium Member
It has been 5 days so far since the one little O.mercatooris hatched from its egg. It is doing well and still alive. It has been using a empty astreia snail shell as its home. The tank it is in is stocked with amphipods and copepods. I had not seen it in 2 days because it hides so far back in the shell. Today I took a little piece of thawed frozen mysis shrimp and put the rice size piece on the end if a probe. I placed it in the entrance of the shell and ...BAM .. the little guy came running out to grab the food. It draged the piece back in with it. I tried a second piece a few minutes later but the little guy huffed and puffed it out of the shell with little blasts of water.
I guess one was enough lol. When ever I can get some pics I will post some. I will have to wait till it gets a little bigger.
chris
 
Glad to read that little rudiger is doing so well, dont worry about pics..... just keep his little tentacled *** alive!!!! hehehe

hope you're having fun!

C
 
Very nice! I hope he makes it, that would be great. How long do you think it will take for him to grow to adult size? Do you have a tank ready or getting ready for him?

pat
 
Pat, Right now the little guy is the size of small pea. Well.. very small pea. lol. Maybe 6 months to a adult... Sooo cute though. This was the only egg that hatched. All others turned out to be infertile. This one was in the cave though. The one on the string didn't make it. Thr little guy poked its leggs though too early it seemed.
Well If I can rear this one little guy to adult it will be a awesome thing.
 
Well colin, im not sure you could say i have a NEW project, but I have been working a lot on my tank. Im trying to get my tank as ready as i can for another octopus. This will be my second octo keeping, so I know a little about what not to do this time, i.e. remove all fish (even not aggressive ones) from the tank before the octo arrives so as not to stress him. I put some black mollies in my tank to try to up the bioload. One of them didnt make 24 hours, but the others have now been in there for 3 days. I think Ill make an order from fishsupply in two weeks.

pat
 
Cool

did your new sand and rocks and stuff settle in okay? ...... what about the water conditions now? AND..... are you still using the refugium???? hehe questions questions....

C
 
Everything is great. I put in a lot more sand so now the bed is 3 inches in most parts, less in other areas. I did a flashlight run last night and I found a crazy 3 inch long centipede looking creature scurry inside one of the rocks. I guess there was a mini cycle after adding more rocks and the sand because I had a diatom bloom, but all the levels are down to 0 now. I think ill order a bimaculoides in another week. I had my sump setup as a fuge for only a short period of time, i cant give it enough light without building something and im too lazy to do that right now. Its pretty small anyway, only 5 gallons. Good for storing octopus food though!

pat
 
Pat, what you saw scurry into the rock was a bristle worm. A good thing to have in a octo tank. They eat all the left over food. If you need lighting check out AHsupply.
 
filter?

filter?

Chris,
Thanks for posting the info on this guy. What size tank do you have this little guy in? What type of filter, if any, do you have running on it?
Lastly, are the bimacs a large or small species egg layers. I think next time around I'm going to try and raise some of these guys.
Thanks,
Bill
 
I spotted King Bristelworm last night in my tank.... Must be about 10" long, think I'll need bigger tweezers for that one....
 
LOL

no way, he's staying! Had as much fun feeding him last night as the cuttle!

They do a good job of eating up all the dismembered body parts the cuttle leaves behind!
C
 
oh, tweezers for feeding him, i thought you meant for removing him. You can feed him?? When i spotted a bristleworm in my tank he ran into a rock. What do you feed it?? And why are we talking about bristleworms in a thread marked mercatoris babies? Oh well

pat
 
Em, good question, but you mentioned bristleworms first!!! LOL....... but just to finish it off..... It was being fed just to get some pics of it, fat thing ate a full piece of mussel!
 
Goodman
In one of the back threads, There is info and a pic of what I am rearing the O.mercatoris hatchling in. It is the same set up the eggs were in. I also built a rearing system that there are some pics of I will use in the future when I get more eggs. There are different methods of rearing too. Bimaculoides are large eggs species. What happend to the eggs you had? They were small eggs, but you could still attempt it. You never know......
 
Sweet...I'll do a little looking for the post. Shortly after the octo died, I removed her.
In the tank with her I had a Damsel, that was frightened of her, and I think he ate the eggs after I removed her. I would have removed them had I not thought they were so impossible to raise. At the time I didn't have another tank to put the damsel in (I refuse to put damsels in my reef any more). In hindsight, I should have moved them to there own tank maybe just to see them hatch if nothing else. There must have been 700 or 800 eggs, and that was the second batch! They were very, very tiny.
Thanks again. Happy Cephaling.
Bill
 
Well I caught "FRY" out hunting tonight. The little guy has almost doubled in size in a little over a week. Sooo cute. It looks like Fry is doing well. Some day I will get some pics. If any one is looking for some great info on baby octo care and rearing check out the breeders registry and do a search on octopus. Some good info on the small egg bimaculatus. One thing interesting is the hecocotylus on this species(bimac) is so minute that it can not be used to sex this species. Instead adult males have 1 or 2 specialized enlarged suckers on arms 2 and 3. This is a published in Intertidal Invertibrates of California. I got this book last year for christmas and is a serious ID book on inverts.
chris
 
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