well it seems that what i thought was true. conan has laid a massive clump of eggs in the new den. from what i can tell shes laid about 10-15 strands of 20-30 eggs each and shes still in the process of laying as i type:bugout:(she must of been eating a whole lot to push all those out i guess). right now ive got about 40 peppermint shrimp in the tank and half are about to lay eggs which will be great for the babies to eat. since ive got about 50 lbs of live rock in the sump i think ill add it to the tank to provide more hiding spaces for the babies. i think im gonna go with the "live and let die" approach and just let the babies hatch in the tank then ill just pull out a dozen or so that i can find and put them in seperate breeder nets and try a few individually.

coulpe questions though for the more experienced...

1) are the adult peppermint shrimp going to go for the baby octos or should they be fine if kept fed?(if they are then they are not a problem to catch really)

2)what size food should i have ready for the babies? copopods, mysids, 1/4 inch shore shrimp?

3) depending on my success does anyone want one if i can easily catch some extras for the breeder nets? (i figure the fewer in the tank the less likely cannibalisim will occur)

4)ive got one of those big filters over my power head in the tank so i think that will be fine but for my overflow (hang on back skimmer box) whats the best solution for safeguarding that? im thinking of getting the tube filters and cutting slots in them then sliding them over the teeth of the box, just gonna have to clean them regularly.


anyway sorry bout the lenghthy post just never had to deal with large eggs... only small which were always unsuccessful. ill try to get some pictures up as soon as i can get a decent shot since the only way to see the eggs is by crawling under and behind the tank and peeking behind the back cover.

I did succeed in rasing a little bimac to the age of about 4 1/2 months by the method you're going to use. I think she would have lived to adulthood if I had known she was there and had moved her to my big tank, but she didn't make herself visible until she was about 4 months old.

I put 6 day-old hatchlings into the tank. The tank was mature had had abundant mysids (I had stocked it with extras, too), copepods, amphipods, and very small crabs.

I wonder about the peppermint shrimp. Bristle worms are a danger too - they don't eat the hatchlings, but they go for the food a hatchling has captured, and in doing so chomp off a couple of legs (unfortunately, I've seen this as well as read about it). Some should survive. Briareus is cannabalistic, so they may eat each other, too. Tough world for little octopuses.

Good luck with this project. It would be good if a few others would take some hatchlings.

Nancy

Joefish,
I have only had mercatoris young and only one very successful hatching (my second hatching has not done very well but I still have 3 after almost 3 months of the tank bred group). My first group was very successful without cannibalism my second has been a disaster and most of the young have disappeared. I don't know if they escaped the net or were 100% eaten as I have only found 4 bodies, the rest havd just vanished (in a cup, the dead one I experimented with stayed wholely recoginizable for 4 days and seemed to dehydrate more than decay).

I believe your peps will eat all that hatch and stay in the tank. They can be very aggressive and the diver I do some web work for has seen them gang up on convicts and systematically kill and consume them.

I have no clue if my experience will translate to a different species of octopus but ... I have been feeding small shore shrimp and Cyclop-eeze to the baby Mercs. With the first, more successful batch, I included new hatch brine in the mix (there were only 6 hatchlings and 5 survived, all living in the same net until about 3 months old, then separated into 2 and 3 for another 2 months, then placed in aquariums at 5 months - your survivers will grow larger much faster). If I were to do it over again, I would include the new hatch brine with the Cyclop-eeze and wait another month before introducing the shrimp but I don't know if feeding the live food earlier with the second batch encouraged cannibalisim or if there was any impact at all. I journaled the hatchling experiences if you want to browse for my actions and reactions ;>): http://www.tonmo.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10133

Animal Mother just got a very small Briarius and should be able to give good idea on feeding once they are a little larger.

I would be more than willing to try to raise a hatchling or two and will have a large enought tank ready after my Mercs die of old age (sometime in the next two months, they are almost 11 months old now). The three little ones will take the smaller tank that now houses Sisturus and Medusa and the larger tank will be vacant. We have expected to put a Briarius in that tank once we lost the majority of the hatchlings so it would be great to have one that is tank raised.

i can easily catch the shrimp out of the aquarium thats not so much a problem. as for bristleworms i really dont ever see any in my tank for some reason. when i put all the rock back in the main tank ill have around 150 lbs of live rock in there which should provide plenty of rock work for the little fellas. what ill probably do is set up about 8 breeder nets and try to catch as many as i can to put in there so ive got a more controlled situation with them.

on a second note, does anyone know an easy way to catch pods and mysids aside from pulling up seaweed and shaking it out? i live right on charleston harbor and its not hard to find places with lots of both, i just need to find an efficient method to catch lots.

heres some pics. the egg mass is almost as large as her mantle so its definitly alot of eggs. took her all night to lay them.

full of questions...

bout how long is the hatch time frame for briareus? the last octo i had was a dwarf (i think o alecto) and it took about 4-5 weeks if i remember correctly.

haha didnt even notice the cardinal fish in the picture on the right trying to look into the den(top right corner with the red eye)... guess i gotta try and get him out over the next few weeks

on another note good news shes happily taking frozen shrimp. she must have been hungry after laying the eggs...

I haven't seen my little one in about a week. It's still in the critter keeper (as far as I know). I haven't added any food since I haven't seen her, I just have a ton of snails (I find a lot of stomatella shells when I clean) and there are a couple of tiny hermits left and I stick a tiny piece of krill in for them to munch on. I'm assuming the baby briareus' tend to hide a lot so I just keep telling myself it's still alive in there somewhere.

Sorry, and congratulations... I think.

Joefish,
You seem to have a great view of the eggs! PLEASE take and post a picture every week so we can see them develop!

Sounds like you've got a good plan for the babies. I would lay money on the ones that you don't catch not making it just because of the problem with food density but we will all be very interested in your frequent :grin: updates.

One thing I did not mention that I think may be important is that I keep water flowing through the net during the day but turn it off at night (my power head is on the same timer as my lights) when I feed to keep the food density high (there is still movement from the main sump overflow). This helps clean out the net but I think they need the water movement even without the net cleaning effect. With the higher number of potential young, you may want to add or rearange some kind of power head type setup (a bit difficult to add because of the intake but arranging the nets around your existing might be doable). The reason I think I should have used brine is for the movement of live critters to stimulate the feeding reaction and the pods you want to catch should help there and be a healthier food source. The jury is still out on whether or not feeding the shrimp early encouraged cannibalism (or even if there was any but I don't have another explanation).

Keep the cards an letters coming! Vicarious octo parenting is almost as much fun as having them (kind of like grand kids) without the worry (unless I get a chance to raise one :tongue:).

yeah ive been told of a pod trap by my friend that has the fish store so im gonna try it. basically it entails a large filter sponge soaked in fish food water then i can place it under my dock for a week and pull it up and it should be loaded. i might make about 5 of these and just leave them in the tank and sump for the babies to hunt off of and also provide a constant supply of pods in the tank with it. ive read now that it takes 50+ days for the eggs to hatch so ive got about that long to get the tank completely packed with pods which shouldnt be too hard. also it said that the eggs should have visible embryos after the first week so since its been 3 days i cant wait to see.

on another note i read that if the water temp is held at higher reading say 80 or so the eggs will not only develope faster but hatch out slightly larger which could be to my advantage by skipping one food size maybe so im going to try that.

ive also just read in someone elses post that air stones cause problems in cephs so im gonna have to try and come up with a different method for my nusery tanks that im setting up(maybe i can just slip a peice of tubing over the stones that goes just up to the water surface or something?)

ill get some pics up today at some point with the pics from day 3 and day 4. so far shes actually still eating a couple times a day so she seems to be doing well.

oh yeah and to get that view i have to crawl under the tank then slide my head inbetween the tank and the wall (7" space) then lift up the back drop.... kinda awkward and its funny when i do it cause she looks at me and starts waving an arm at me like "howed you get back here youre not supposed to be in here! leave this place at once!"

oh yeah and to get that view i have to crawl under the tank then slide my head inbetween the tank and the wall (7" space) then lift up the back drop.... kinda awkward and its funny when i do it cause she looks at me and starts waving an arm at me like "howed you get back here youre not supposed to be in here! leave this place at once!"

That sounds more like The Great Oz than Conan the Destroyer :lol:

Jean mentioned putting an air stone in a tube connected to an under gravel filter (or concocting something similar) so that the water is drawn from the bottom) and the air bubbles stay at the top. I have no idea how fast these grow (AM says his doubled in size over less than 2 weeks) so I don't know how long you can leave them in a flow through net but what about a larger flow through in the main tank?

Do we call her Conana now or wait until her offspring have off spring?

:lol:

ok took these pics today... its about day6 or so right?

well i can tell that the eggs are much white and not clear anymore and some of them you can start to see the yolk sack and all forming as one big oval inside the eggs

changing her name is exactly what I was thinking...lol.. but that sure looks like a lot of eggs to me... is that a normal number? I would be interested in one of the babies... but I don't think that I have a place for one when they are ready...

little update...

checked on conanny this mornin and she was chomping down on a peice of macro algea... odd... i guess she was hungry so i gave her a couple peices of shrimp which she took quickly.

i also finally caught the cardinal fish that has been evading me for 5 years now... now i just have to get the peppermint shrimp out which by the way have started laying the eggs and now ive got millions of babies crusing the tank at night.

the eggs are getting plumper and more defined in the embryo every day. i can now clearly see an oval yolk inside the egg. im guessing a few more days and ill begin to see little octos inside them.

Joe,
If you are contorting to see these where are our pictures '>)? I always felt I missed out not being able to see eggs develop (my cuttle eggs never matured and both Mercs used the same barnacle and were able to completely block any viewing 100% of the time).

I wonder if there were copepods in the macro that she was munching.

little update again...

the eggs are still turning darker and the yolk is still becoming more defined. a few more days and i think ill start to see babies in there.

i think my food supply is under control. the peppermint shrimp have almost all hatched out the young and now my tank has bagillions of little tiny peppermint shrimp cruising around under the rockwork. right now they are a little smaller than mysids but all the same look just like shrimp. since the adults dont seem to be munching down on them yet im going to leave them in a little longer to see if i cant get another spawn out of them.

is there a way to find the date that i first posted this thread to see how long its been since the eggs have been laid... ive lost track.

Your first post about the eggs was a week ago, according to the information on the post. Maybe Tony (tonmo) could give you the exact date.

Nancy

Love reading about the future offspring of Conan :baby: ! Thanks for sharing!

okay so i may have a few more days before i start seeing the actual babies forming inside the eggs

I think it was almost 3 weeks before I could discern an eye in Varys' eggs... but you have a MUCH better view than we did!

Keep the updates comin'!

Joe,
Across the blue bar at the top of each post is an approximation of when the entry was made (first it will show min then hours, then days, then weeks and then the actual date.) Your first post shows as 2 weeks now but I don't know if that is 1 week + or 2 weeks +. Your first picture of the eggs shows at 1 week. Someone really should add a suggestion to Tony's "TO DO" list to include the actual post date along with the time passage ...

Love reading about the future offspring of Conan :baby: ! Thanks for sharing!

:welcome: to TONMO!

I've been asked to post about my experience with briareus hatchlings.

A few years ago someone here in Dallas had a female briareus who had laid eggs. She wanted to share some of the hatchlings, so three of us were involved in the octo raising project. Debbie put a number of hatchlings in a large mature tank with no large preditors. The tank was also stocked with mysids. A second person took a number to raise in floating containers where they were fed individually with mysids. I took six day old hatchlings to for my mature 19 gallon tank, which had an abundant supply of copepods, mysids, amphipods, small snails and crabs.

Once put into the tank, they disappeared into the live rock. From time to time I caught a glimpse of one of them using a magnifying glass (they were tiny, fully formed octopuses from 1/4 to 1/2 inch long).

The other two people were not successful with their hatchlings, although the ones in floating containers lasted a couple of months.

So after about a week I didn't see any more, and over time thought they had all died. About four months later my husband was cleaning the tank and a little red octopus came charging out. We were both astounded. I had noticed that the amphipod population was reduced, that a few snails and crabs had died, but it never occured to me that I had an octopus in the tank. This tank was on the kitchen counter and we looked at it up close a number of times a day. Never saw anything at night, either. So I must have had a very shy octopus, since it saw us every day and night and never showed itself.

I would have transferred it out to my big tank much earlier if I had known. But it continued to seem frightened and hide after making its first appearance, and in another week or two I found it had died - maybe of stress at having been discovered. I was very sad that the little octopus didn't live longer.

The photos show the 4 month old briareus, the mother Jetta with containers containing her babies,
and one of the babies in a betta cup.

Nancy

Thanks Nancy! I keep thinking I am missing something important. My first experience raising young was very successful, my second a dismal failure (I still have one little "girl" and maybe - if he has not been eaten by his father since he keeps escaping to the tank - one little "boy" but all the rest simply vanished). I keep trying to interest Jean in ceph nutrition (but she hasn't taken the bait) because I keep wondering if there is something "missing" from the water or the food of the female that might be important for successful offspring.

Keeping fingers crossed! Keep offering her food. Many continue to eat during the brooding process!