Penelope, our bimac, has laid eggs.

The first point I should make is that I'm not sure she's really a bimac. We special ordered her from someone who said that they could get the correct species, but she has never had visible eyespots. Her mantle is about 1.5 inches long, and legs stretch 4-5 inches. She's most active morning and evening, but isn't afraid of the light.

We've had her about 2 months. Is there any chance that the eggs are fertile? They hang in chains from the roof of her cave. There are probably 40-50 eggs in each chain, and 10-20 chains of eggs. All are bright white now. The eggs are 1-2mm long each.

When we disturbed her cave, she briefly wandered the tank and actually accepted a piece of shrimp, which she took back to her eggs to eat!

Wow! That's a great picture! Almost looks like something may be forming inside the eggs!! I think I remember Octo's being able to store sperm packets, so maybe they are fertile. I'm sure the experts here will have lots to say!!!

Carol

Congratulations! Definitely look forward to learning how this unfolds -- keep us posted!

FYI all, I recently added the webcam for Penelope to the Ceph Web Directory, in the WebCams (http://www.tonmo.com/links/listing.php?cat=51) category.

Maractwin:

Penelope is very cute. Although, she seems a bit small to be a bimac if she is mature enough to lay eggs but her legs are only 4-5 inches. Tralfaz (my bimac) now has a tentacle span of around 18".

Considering that and the lack of a visible eyespot maybe she is another species (I'm sure Colin would have a better idea of which species). The pictures from your webcam are GREAT. I like the idea of having a small light on the tank at night, I may have to try that. I'm wondering what type of webcam you have because your pictures seem to be much higher quality then the ones from mine??? (Mine is several years old - I'm jealous :goofysca: )

Anyway, good luck with the eggs and please keep us updated as to their (and Penelope's) progress.

George

Congrats :thumbsup:
hey nice pic you got.I think carol is right i do see something in the eggs(or could it be reflection).Well if the eggs are fertile.Good luck when they hatch.hopefully you will manage to get a few adults.
I was wondering.Is it possible to keep two tank raised octos from the same batch together?

The webcam pictures are pretty good because I'm not using just a "webcam" camera. It's a high-quality video camera that we don't use all that often for video projects, so we've had it on the tank the last couple of months.

We have a dim red light on the tank from mid-evening through about 1am. That way we can see what she's up to without really disturbing her.

I'll probably give her another week, then lift the rock that makes the top of her cave once more to snap some closeups of the eggs so that I can figure out if they're fertile or not. Reading this week, then worry about procuring larval foods next week if it looks like the eggs are going to make it. It is tempting to try to raise them...

-Mark

Hi mark

If you can send me some pics of her I'll try to ID her :)

However, she definetly isn't a bimac and I can tell from the size of the eggs. They are too small. If they are only 1-2mm long each then they are classed as being a small egg species as opposed to a bimaculoides which is a large egg species.

The large egg species can be raised in captivity and has been done by home aquarists. But small egg species are an entirely different kettle of cephalopod because the when the eggs hatch the paralarvae will be plantonic and very difficult indeed to raise and feed. There's nothing stopping you from having a go at it but it wont be easy. Good luck with it! :)

have a look at this thread

http://www.tonmo.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=229

Cheers
C

aha!

i just seen the pics of her from the webcam link that i missed teh 1st time round :oops: :bugout:

Anyway, she looks like one of the 'horridus' octopuses and there are a few longarms to choose from. Myself and Jason have both had a few between us but positive ID is tricky.

are occy's hermaphrodites?
or do they need to mate?

Hello Invazn,

Octopuses need to mate, but the female can store sperm for a long time. So this is why some owners find their octopuses laying eggs, even though another octopus has never been present in the tank.

Nancy

Yesterday we exposed the eggs again to get a closer look. I'm still not sure if they are fertile or not. The white specs from the first photo I published I'm pretty sure are just reflections of my camera flash, as the eggs are shiny. But some of them now show brown specks, which may be signs of development.

http://www.actwin.com/jod/octopus_photos/eggs_week2/octo_eggs2.jpg
Here's a pic of Penelope below her egg mass. I'd guess that there are about 24 chains of eggs. Each chain hangs about 2 cm, and contains about 100 eggs (16 eggs long and about 6 surrounding the central thread). That makes about 2,400 eggs, each about 1mm long.

http://www.actwin.com/jod/octopus_photos/eggs_week2/eggscloseup.jpg
The second pic is a closeup of some of the eggs. Here I think it's pretty obvious that the white spots aren't inside the eggs. I'm not certain that the brown spots are, as they could be algae/dirt/muck on the outside. It's not visible on all of the eggs, but where it is visible, is usually towards the center of the egg mass. FYI, the eggs are about 14 days old here.

So I haven't found any useful articles on the net on raising small-egg octopus. Any recommendations on journals/articles to look for when I make it to a university library to do more research?

-Mark

We just checked on the eggs again. It's week 3, approximately 21 days since they were laid.

http://www.actwin.com/jod/octopus_photos/eggs_week3/eggs_week3.jpg
There are definately eyespots on the eggs. Most of them are fertile. The yolk now takes up only about 1/3 of the egg sac.

http://www.actwin.com/jod/octopus_photos/eggs_week3/penelope_week3.jpg

-Mark

Awesome!!!!! 8)

Have you given any thought to how you are going to house any octets (?)that hatch???

Mark

Those are some fantastically clear pictures!!!!! Amazing to see the babies!!!

Any idea when they may hatch? Do the babies eat baby brine shrimp? Maybe you could start cultivating some.

Carol

So we're considering trying to raise the young. But not by culturing lots of live food. I've got a plan for collecting wild plankton. I live in Boston, on the Atlantic. While we're not actually on the water, I'm a 20 minute drive from the ocean.

My idea is to get some plankton nets that will select the size we need, and visit the beach a couple of times a week. Collect a bucket full of plankton, and bring it home and hopefully keep it alive for 3-4 days until the next collecting trip.

I used to raise brine shrimp outside in the summer, and plan on using a similar setup to keep the plankton alive. A large tub sitting in the sun, with some potting soil on the bottom and mostly filled with saltwater. I'll visit some local fish stores and see if I can get some samples of hair algae (fortunately, none of my tanks are infested these days) to start growing in there too.

I'm thinking that I need to collect food items that are about 1/4 the size of the larvae. Does this make sense? That means I'll start with a 250um net. I'm still figuring this out, though I've got to start assembling the parts, as I've probably got 2 weeks before hatching.

-Mark

The eggs you have are planktinic. If they are like some recent eggs I was contacted about you may have less than two weeks. I go collecting all the time at cape ann. It may be tuff to get enough food the correct size 100-400u . Most of the atlantic plankton are isopods and amphipods way to large for the larvae. You can get copepod blums and crab zoea though this time of year .The young will be planktonic for quite awhile. With doing plankton trawls you will need to keep a eye out for hydroids that will grow and sting your young. Your idea is your best chance. I would skip the potting soil and gather some silty ocean mud or shallow water sand. I would caution about leaving the ocean water out side though, it will cook in hours in this heat. Filtration will be the other challenge. I have been working on a way to rear planktonic young. I have some new ideas but nothing tested just yet. I do have access to vast amounts of rotifers, and all the live phytoplankton I can carry home. There is also a copepod that is the correct size range I have been experimenting with, I have been able grow vast amounts in short time. Crab & shrimp zoea are the real key. Ihave been tossing around a few ideas with a new species I have been working with. Even the New England Aquarium was very excited by my idea for rearing GPO paralarvae. Having the food and quantity at the right time is hardest part.
Timing is everything.
-chris :)

Hey Mark!

Any update on your eggs??? New Pictures????

Carol

Mom is still watching the eggs. I'm reluctant to bother her too much at this point (Chris relayed a story where disturbing eggs caused premature hatching). Here are a couple of pics which aren't as clear as previous weeks.

http://www.actwin.com/jod/octopus_photos/eggs_week4/penelope.jpg

http://www.actwin.com/jod/octopus_photos/eggs_week4/eggs.jpg

I've exchanged email with a number of people about this in the last week. I've had a couple of experts tell me that it won't be possible to raise the inklings. But we're going to try anyway. We've got a rotifer culture up and going, and are working on copepods. We've constructed rearing chambers for them. We'll be starting a detailed journal as they hatch. I'll try to photodocument everything as well.

-Mark

They started hatching this morning! They're larger than I expected, about 1.5-2mm long. Here's one:

http://www.actwin.com/jod/octopus_photos/inklings_day1/mantle60x_pic1.jpg

So far, only a couple hundred have hatched. I expect they'll keep appearing for several days. I'm putting some into rearing chambers which are half-liter sized plastic container floating in the tank. I've cut out much of the bottoms of these containers and glued coffee-filters in on the bottoms. This gives water exchange with the main tank while keeping in both inklings and rotifers. I've also got a gentle air bubbler running in each chamber. I think they're eating the rotifers, though it's hard to tell for sure. Based on a paper by Villanueva, I'll be trying to keep 100-300 prey items per liter of water.

There are more pictures at http://www.actwin.com/jod/octopus_photos/inklings_day1/

I hope to get an online journal going on our site shortly. I'll post a pointer to it here once that is done.

-Mark

hi mark,

that is an amazing pic. wow. we have a similar octo ,our post is before yours actually, and shejust finished laying her eggs. seems that you only had a gestation period of 30 days? and are you feeding the lil guys only rotifers or something else as well?
and perhaps you could email me that paper on the food? if it all possible?

we are going to attempt to raise our little guys as well! thank so much!

dominika

Hey Mark!!!

Congrats!!! Great pictures! They are sooo tiny! Good luck with rearing them!!!

Carol

The paper I found with a lot of helpful information is

Villanueva R. 1995. Experimental rearing and growth of planktonic Octopus vulgaris from hatching to settlement. Canadian Journal of Fish. Aquat. Science. 52 : pp.2639-2650

You can download a PDF from http://www.cephbase.dal.ca/refdb/pdf/6300.pdf

The inklings in the rearing chambers are doing fine. There aren't as many visible now swimming in the main tank. This is odd since there aren't any predators in there other than a few bristle worms.

-Mark

thanks so much mark! that is a great article..
can't wait to see more pics

dominika

What a fabulous visual record you've created. Thanks so much for your contributions here.

That is one cute baby....!!!!!

Many more eggs hatched today. There's probably a thousand inklings swimming around the tank. Anyone in the Boston area want some? We're only going to keep a couple hundred...

If you're interested in following our efforts to raise them, check out http://www.actwin.com/jod/inklingjournal.html as we update the journal daily. If anything significant happens, I'll post here as well.

-Mark

Thanks for giving us access to the journal, and documenting this effort so well. Your photos are also excellent.
Good luck - hope lots of the little guys survive.

Nancy

Dear Mark,

Your photos and your inklings are wondrous! My sweetie wants to know what exactly are you using to take pictures of these little darlings. A microscope?

It was also suggested that I relay the cautionary tale of the toad. He says:

"In British schools, they use a creature called Xenopus Laevis (the African clawed toad) to teach reproduction in biology class. The clawed toad is ideal for this, because it absolutely, resolutely, steadfastly refuses to breed in captivity, thus there is no danger of it corrupting young minds.

"Unfortunately, when I was about twelve, I had a biology teacher who had no intention of being thwarted by the toad's natural reticence. By giving the poor creatures some kind of hormone injection, he managed to persuade them to breed.

"In quantity. It turns out that toads lay lots of eggs. And in the sheltered environment of a biology lab fish tank, with no predators, the survival rate must have been better than 50%. Suddenly, he was confronted with a new problem: what, exactly, can you do with three or four hundred tiny toadlets that threaten to turn into large, energetic, demanding adult toads faster than you can say xenopus etcetera?

"The answer is that you give them away, in pairs, to every child in the school. And the children take them home to their parents who say "How nice dear" and stick them in an available fish tank, hoping that by the end of the summer, natural causes will have resolved the problem.

"But the African clawed toad is extraordinarily long-lived. And that is why, twenty-six years later, there is still an African clawed toad, lurking lugubriously in a small fishtank on top of my parents' refrigerator.

"I can picture your friend with the inklings sitting outside his house with a cardboard box and a sign reading 'Young octopuses - free to a good home' written in shaky, desperate magic marker, while behind him a half a hundred adolescent octopuses crawl in and out of the windows and chase the neighborhood cats up trees."

I think we are all more than a little in awe of your achievement.

Melissa

You asked how I take the pictures. Most of them are taken with a regular digital camera. I use an Olympus C-5050Z, which is a fairly new 5 megapixel camera. From about a foot away on macro mode at highest resolution I get a 2560x1920 image with a field of about 3 inches. The octopus pictures were taken like that and then resized to a lower resolution to share. The closeups of the eggs before they hatched were taken that way and then just the center of the picture was cropped out at full resolution.

The pics of the inklings post-hatching were taken with a digital microscope. I've got a QX3 by Digital Blue. http://playdigitalblue.com/products/qx3/main It's sold as a kid's educational toy. It's a USB computer peripheral, like a webcam, but it's a microscope with 10x, 60x, and 200x magnification. You can get it from Toys-R-Us among other places. The 10x and 60x work pretty well. It's very difficult to focus the 200x lens. I'd love to get a good stereo disecting scope for this, but don't want to drop $1000 on it. The QX3 is under $100. It only comes with windows software, but there's a third-party driver for the Mac which I'm using.

So far we haven't killed any of the inklings. This means that he is swimming in circles in the drop of water on the microscope while I'm trying to snap pictures. I know the right way is to add a drop of alcohol, killing it so that it stays still and I can get pictures. But I haven't been willing to do that yet.

Are you seeing them feed yet?

Mark, if TONMO gave an award for animal husbandry, you would win!

Have they grown appreciably since hatching? They must be eating, and like Colin, I want to know (and I bet other readers do too) if you can see them eating. Would that take a great deal of luck with the microscope?

We are taking up so much of your time with our questions, when you would probably rather be watching inklings!

Melissa

They haven't grown that I can measure. We're probably getting a different individual each time I put one under the microscope, so it's hard to be certain. But I'd say most of them are actually between 2mm and 2.5mm. At 60x magnification, the field is 3.5mm wide, so I'm using their size relative to the size of the picture to estimate length.

We think we've seen feeding behavior, but we're not certain. We haven't captured it under the microscope. But to the naked eye, sometimes it looks like they're feeding. When we turn on a bright desk lamp to the side of the tank (only occasionally) the rotifers move towards the light, and the inklings seem to follow.

I'm hoping to borrow some time at a biology lab at a local university in the next few days. Hopefully I'll be able to better observe things on a better microscope.


There's bad news today too. We had substantial deaths in about half of the rearing chambers. In studying the differences between the chambers where they did well and those where many died, I think we've been overfeeding them. We're probably overwhelming them with rotifers that die before they can be eaten. So I've flushed the water in the rearing chambers, re-stocked them with fresh hatchlings, and am now being much more controlled about the feeding. I got a good maginying glass and was able to estimate the density of our rotifer cultures at 80/ml for one and 100/ml for the other. So now I'm using a syringe to draw a calibrated amount of solution from the rotifer culture in an attempt to keep the prey density at 100-200/liter by adding a little bit many times a day.

We also setup a third tank, using a different paradigm. This is a bare 10G tank, filled with about 8G of salt water. There's a heater and an airstone and that's it. We put in about 100 inklings, and am dosing it with "Ultimate", the water conditioner we were sent with the rotifer culture. This de-toxifies ammonia etc. so that you don't need a bio filter.

We're probably got another day of fresh hatchlings before I won't be able to re-stock from any further problems. And I'm not getting any of my work done this week. It's a good thing I'm self-employed (though my clients aren't happy...).

-Mark

I must say, this is terribly fascinating to follow. I've always wondered about the rearing of paralarval cephalopods. I wish you luck!

Congradulations on the inklets. Penelope's webcam was the first thing that brought me to Tonmo.

So far we haven't killed any of the inklings. This means that he is swimming in circles in the drop of water on the microscope while I'm trying to snap pictures. I know the right way is to add a drop of alcohol, killing it so that it stays still and I can get pictures. But I haven't been willing to do that yet.

Good!, please don't kill the little babies for a better picture. The pictures are awesome as is! What will you guys do with all of them?!? Unlike practically everything else that size these beasties have the potential to grow to be as big, beautiful and intelligent as Penelope. They're not inconsequencial paramisia or water-flees. Good luck with them - I'm sure you could sell a few to good homes on Tonmo. :)

They're not inconsequencial paramisia or water-flees

Bah! nothing wrong with paramecium or Brachiopods! I'm rearing some Triops right now and enjoying that nearly as much as octos... :lol: :lol:

Only time will tell with the paralarvae... They are much more difficult to rear than larvae from large egg species... not that it can't be done, it has, but it will be a great achievment if the larvae eventually settle and grow on from there :)



fingers crossed

Bah! nothing wrong with paramecium or Brachiopods!

True. I don't advocate hurting the simple beasties either :D I'm just saying these baby cephs are, uh... "more" than simple protozoa.

nah, I agree...... I am gulity of sending millions of daphnia to their premature deaths in all sorts of aquaria! :?

Colin the paramecia murderer. hehe. Colin the ripper...
I did want to say though, that this thread is absolutely amazing to me...you have a lot of dedication, Mark. I too am self employed, but I have to bow to your octo-raising project :notworth: !!!
Very impressive. I am also out to buy a microscope-dig/pic at Toysrus this weekend...great idea!
Thanks!
Greg

We just lost the last of the inklings. So five and half days was the longest we could keep them alive. They held on longest in the rearing chambers in Mom's tank.

I've certainly learned a lot from this. I may well want to try again at some point. There are a number of things I would do differently. And I'm not convinced that rotifers are a good first food for them.

I'll probably write an article about this experience to try to share some of this.

-Mark

:( So sorry to hear but thanks for sharing all your experience with them!

Carol

Dont worry about it Mark, it is a very tricky thing to do...

Perhaps getting bimac eggs or briareus or some other large egg species would be a way of getting experience at rearing larvae which are easier to start with?

As you said, you have learned a lot from this and so have the rest of the TONMO.com community so please continue to share any observations and future projects.

all the best
Colin