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There are about 31-32 babies and I think only 1-3 more eggs may be viable. The rest are all deflated and have hatched. I'll give it a couple more days then remove them.
It's a good thing there are no more. Besides the fact these guys and their even smaller food are going to devour a small fortune. I have no more room for breeder nets.
Here are some iphone pics of the semi ghetto setup.
The 10g tank was added just for the cuttles. The fact I used whatever I had lying around for it is why there is a gurgle in the videos. I just used a maxijet and some half inch soft tubing to feed it water from the frag tank while its returned with whatever pvc I had lying around.
There are a total of 7 nets, all but the one with the eggs in it half 4-6 babies in them.
For those who don't know how small these guys are check out this pic.
All of them are eating now. The oldest maybe 3 mysids a day. I am feeding them twice a day, slightly more then 1 per cuttle each feeding. They all seem to be eating although I don't make sure everyone eats each and every time. If size differences start to show I'd consider moving some, but frankly if a few don't make it I'll be okay with that.
1000 more mysids coming tomorrow. I hope they arrive at my door and I don't have to go to the airport to get them due to customs delays. I wonder how many I actually get. The 500 order last time seemed like 1000. Hopefully the 1000 order isn't just the same size at a higher cost.
They have learned to hunt a lot better. The first few days they were very slow to catch the mysids. Now they are caught in seconds. Once they get a bit bigger I'll take some new pics / videos.
So last night I didn't feed my babies. Today I figured I'd wait a bit. Normally I feed them once in the early morning, once in the evening and once more at night.
Today I decided to give pe mysis a go. Surprisingly about 80% of them did eat them! Some of these cuttlefish are not even 2 weeks old and the mysis are 2x longer then them or more! I didn't get this on video but I wish I did. 2 of them fighting over one until it split in half. I did get a couple of other clips I will post later.
Hopefully I can switch to 1 pe and 1-2 live mysid feedings a day. Save a bit of money and the larger food should help them grow to the shore shrimp stage faster.
I didn't video tape this mostly because I did it entirely on impulse. I was looking at the cuttlefish's future home. There is a couple of shore shrimp in there I've had since last year. One was right near the top, and I was dosing alkalinity with a tiny cup. I figured what the hell I scooped him up and put him in the breeders net.
Right away the cuttlefish started striking at him. No luck. The shrimp is bigger then the biggest one and much faster. So what do these little aliens do? They gang up and surround him. It was so cool like they were hovering him formation. They cornered him and one got the shrimp. Of course he didn't share, and they weren't doing this to work together, but it sure looked like it, by cornering him one was able to grab him since he had no choice but to swim by one.
I still have several hundred mysids. I'm going to burn through those this week. Collect some larger pods as well, and hopefully next week receive 500 shore shrimps. The smaller ones should be okay to feed to my guys. Which by the way are not yet one month old!
It's getting to the point where $200 worth of mysids are only going to last the week. I'm going to pick up some ghost Shrimp feed them all and any that can't take down one will be seperated and fed my remaining mysids as well as amphipods. Next week I'll order 500 shore shrimp. Ghost are much cheaper and very similar but again who knows about feeding fw to sw. I'm not a huge believer it's a big deal especially with the staple food for many sea creatures being freshwater pe mysis. That being said I've invested a lot of time and money and research into keeping cuttles so the bulk of their food will be sw. A few days of ghost shrimp should be more then fine Imo.
So i bought 150 ghost shrimp today. Almost every single cuttlefish ate one. Some were 1/3rd the size of the shrimp. I expect a mess tomorrow. I'll syphon out the remains and add more. The stragglers will still be feed mysids and pods. I will separate them if need be. For now it looks like they're fine. Even the runs eventually work up the guys to take out the considerably larger shrimp.
I was making fun of your typing skills - but yes, some of the more timid ones develop confidence when stalking larger prey. You will practically see them grow before your eyes with this larger food.
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