actinic lighting

[octomatic]

hey guys, i just put a 420nm 24" actinic bulb on my tank. it only 17 watts. i heard the an octopus sees better in the blue spectrum of light, but im hoping this will be ok....the main reason why im using this light is it looks BA! and I also heard that this type will assist with growing coraline algae faster. lemme know if this is ok or if I should go with the 50/50 light. basically the light that came with the ballast is a standard light and my coralline algae is bleaching a little.

 

[DWhatley]

Since each animal acts a little (or a lot) differently from the next, it is hard to put a finger on any one item in a tank that leads to the most successful interaction experience. We really don't have strong recordings one way or another about an octopuses reaction to different wave lengths. The one bit of consistent reporting is for the O. mercatoris and red lighting at night but daytime lighting is still a lot of conjecture.

 

[octomatic]

didnt really care for the look of it anyway, it was WAY to dark for me. I scrapped it and bought a 50/50 light instead.

 

[Mike Bauer]

Well after years of diving and many daylight vs night dives, I found that octopus like low light. You hardly ever see them in the day but always at night feeding on the coal heads and other crustations. But on the flip side of that coin I can say, I think anything can be trained to do what you want by feeding habits. Ring a bell and feed a fish will cause the fish to gather at the front of the tank at feeding time. I feel the old teachings hold true, thing do as they are trained. So tanks raised by people who get up early and feed vs tank raised by people who feed when they get home from work are all different from the natural order of things based on God or the moon. At dusk when the sun sets and the night becomes dark but not black and the mood is full or at half light, it is still slightly light in the ocean and that is when the true night hunter come out to feed. In short tank raised does not imitate the wild.

Sorry, to answer your question, I think that all octopus like it best when the food is out and they can catch it. Wild at night ( Dim lighting or trained anytime).

Mike

 

[Thales]

You can't lump all octopus together. Some are nocturnal, some crepuscular and some diurnal.
'Actinic' lighting does weird stuff to human eyes, so it has been speculated that it can do weird stuff to ceph eyes.

 

[Mike Bauer]

You can't lump all octopus together. Some are nocturnal, some crepuscular and some diurnal.
'Actinic' lighting does weird stuff to human eyes, so it has been speculated that it can do weird stuff to ceph eyes.

Good answer! All octopus should be kept at the lighting that they would have in the wild. Little to none.