:welcome: i have been researching alout on wut would be the best thing to put in a 55 gallon,and at the same time make a great home for a bimac octo.
Heres wut i came up w/.
1.soft corals
2.feather dusters
3.lighting(need help on wut kind of lighting,cant decide wuts best as far as watts go)
4.would hard corals be bad?
5.live sand and rock
6.timer
7.test kit
8.fluval 304
9. protien skimmer
10.salt water plants
11.270gphpower sweep power head
12.clean up crew(wut do u suggest? SNAILS ARE A PAIN)
13.salt
14.x large and large resin rocks(for a den)
15.carbon
16.wut about a bubble wand,or disk,is more o2 needed?
17.shells
18.shrimp,clam,crabs,or crayfish
19.octo comes later, when i get more experienced

no. 18 wont last long no matter what the size, corals could get moved out of place and hard corals could sting the octopus otherwise i dont see a problem, the brighter the lighting, the less you see of the octopus, have you kept marines before?

No hard coral. Yes, soft corals can be moved by your octo, but you'll just have to live with that.

Bubble wand OK until you get your octo, then remove it.

nancy

wont the bubble wand just end up makin the tank a big skimmer??

lol i dunno, just thought it might be good for somthing lol, good point Scouse.

Ben, i dont have very much experience, i must addmite, but thats my reason for keeping shrimp,or crabs for awhile, so that i get more experienced first, i cant consider a tank anyway, for atleast 9 months, or even a year from now, considering the fact that im going to be moving to a new house, and must asure that my sea life creatures have a permanet, and stable home.
nancy, are corals needed for a proper octo thank?
thanx all for the great advice!!!
nini

wont the bubble wand just end up makin the tank a big skimmer??


Only if you also export the foam! :D

you know whats kinda funny is that it was an articale in aquarium fish magazine that re-sparked my interest in keepen octos and in that article it recomends to add a few airstones to the tank. in fact at first i did have an airator on my tank til i read here that too many bubbbles can b fatale. ah live en lern (apearently not how to spell)

Yeah IG Crabs,

Bubbles can be fatal. We have airlifts in all our tanks but not in the octopus ones (& very much reduced air flow in the seahorse tank, bubbles can be bad for them too!).

J

intresting!!!
would brim shrimp be good for octo food, or will they get tierd of it?
has anyone kept brim shrimp, as a live food for octos?are they easy to keep alive untill feeding time?

Sorry Nini, Brine shrimp Artemia spp are NOT good food for octopus (except as a very last resort and ONLY if they are within 24hours of hatching and/or are enriched). There's very little nutrition in them.....kinda like us living on a diet of lettuce only!

J

o ic,thanx,so wut shrimp,would be best, or food 4 that matter?

Nini, I think all of your feeding questions can be answered by reading the papers by Nancy and Colin, and doing some searches on Tonmo...there has been a lot of debate about octo diets, but I do believe they have been hammered out for quite a while !
best,

greg

k,and thanx agian.
nini

feather dusters can be very delicate and if the octo inadvertantly disturbs it it might not last (happened to me - lost several!!!)

is a feather duster the same as a tube worm?

caught my massive hermit tryin to eat mine!!! He's retired to sump since!!

Hi Scouse,

The featherduster is a tube worm, but it's not the only tube worm.

How big is this massive hermit? He might have been trying to clean algae off the tube rather than trying to eat the featherduster, but crabs can eat other invertebrates.

nancy

hey Nancy

he's about 7-8cm long he nailed Hercules a giant super turbo snail so he went in the sump then i decided well ok if thats what he's gunna do then fine put him back then cughthim biting a big chunk out the tube worm so he went in sump i thought oh come on an put him back an he tried to eat starsky my stumpy starfish so i thought thats it he's back in sump!!!

i feed him a defrosted whitebait or bit of tiger prawn each night.

heres a pic ofg him lookin rather sad prior to my refugium etc goin!!

it does sound rather big and rather like your feather duster will be much happier now...lol

I've noticed that hermit crabs can be a bit destructive when they grow larger and thump about in their big shells.

I have one like that who had to be banned from my smaller tank because he had broken the gorgonian, run over small featherdusters, overturned shells and rocks. He even broke the tube of the large featherduster (or did he take a bite?).

He's probably not more than 3 cm, but his shell is huge and awkward (he killed a large snail for its shell, I think).

But there's something very appealing about crabs, despite all this!

Nancy