Bimac Hatchlings

As you will soon learn, hiding in plain site is a trick they pull off frequently. Even knowing this and knowing where to look, sometimes it takes me a few minutes to spot Monty (the briareus are large enough to be easily seen when in front of the LR but sometimes I have to take a second look even to find them).
 
How does water circulate through the traps? Closer photo please. (Sorry if I am being difficult to please...I am just so interested in case our O. briaeus has viable young.)
I think you need more live rock (for nitrifying bacteria to help with possible ammonia issues) or is it connected to a sump?
It looks good Sue. Staying tuned :biggrin2:
 
Lmecher;173343 said:
How does water circulate through the traps? Closer photo please. (Sorry if I am being difficult to please...I am just so interested in case our O. briaeus has viable young.)
I think you need more live rock (for nitrifying bacteria to help with possible ammonia issues) or is it connected to a sump?
It looks good Sue. Staying tuned :biggrin2:

Not a problem..... feel free to ask away - it's how we all learn, right? The breeder trap on the far left of the tank is very fine mesh so circulation is not a problem. The one in the middle is clear plastic but the bottom is slotted, and the one on the far right is plastic but slotted on the right and left sides. Whenever I am in there checking on them or feeding them I "swish" the traps to get the old food out and fresh water in and tonight I will hook up a siphon and get all the debris off the bottom.

Regarding the live rock, I'm torn. Yes, we need a lot for converting ammonia to nitrite to nitrate, etc. but these guys will be escaping their traps soon and will be "loose" in the 20 gallon tank and I will NEVER find them with rock in there. And when I try to carefully move and examine rocks to look for them I may hurt or kill one of them. Not sure what to do.

Regarding filtration for now, I went out and bought them a Fluval G6 which is rated for 160 gallons. In addition, when I assembled it and got to the part where you put in the rock-like media for bio filtration, I took apart one of my other Fluval canisters, removed the bio-rocks from the established one and used those in the brand new Fluval. Hopefully between the mechanical filtration, the carbon, and the bio media from the established tank, I can keep things under control. As long as I keep siphoning uneaten food out I don't think these little guys will be able to pollute a 20 gallon for at least a few weeks. (fingers crossed).
Sue
 
Thanks for the reminder to check water parameters daily. My other tanks are well established and full of corals so I can just look and see if everything is OK but in a new tank that' practically baron it wouldn't become visibly evident until it's too late.

Last night I cleaned the octo tank (and ultimately did a 50% water change) and had planned on doing that every 2-3 days, but after doing it last night I'm not so sure. It turned out to be a bigger job than I had planned and probably very disruptive to the hatchlings. I was going to simply and gently use a siphon to suction debris off the bottom of the main tank and then replace whatever water was removed. I never keep things simple, though. When I started siphoning the bottom I noticed that most of the debris ends up under and around the base of the live rock so I decided to remove it. Of course, with one hatchling MIA I had to carefully examine each nook and cranny of each rock to see if I could find him before putting the rock somewhere. At this point I started agreeing with my friends and relatives.... I really DO have rocks in my head! Have you ever tried to find a creature that's 1/2 inch long that camoflauges itself perfectly to whatever it's attached to???? Not to mention, the rock I have in there is very open and contains hundreds of nooks and crannies. It took a long time but I finally felt confident that each rock I was relocating (temporarily) was free of octopus (and yes, I DID find the missing one!)

OK, so now the bottom of the tank is clear of rock and easy for me to clean, but the bottoms of the individual breeding traps have dead food and debris in them. I can't very well suction in there so I have to remove the rock rubble from each one and examine it for a hatchling before putting it down somewhere. I found the four hatchlings (amazing) and relocated all five to a plastic tub so I could clean their traps. I loaded up the tub with food hoping they would be intrigued with that instead of each other.

I then removed the sponges that I have covering the intakes and cleaned those. By the time I was done, 50% of the water in the tank was gone. Of course, 50% of the live mysis that was freely swimming in the tank was getting suctioned too so I actually tried to catch those in a turkey baster before I flushed the siphoned water down the toilet (rocks in my head I tell ya).

Now down to the basement to make sure the replacement water is as close to the removed water as possible. The salinity was a little too low and the temperature a little too warm so I added some salt and moved it outside for a few minutes to cool off. I went to check on "the kids", put their breeding traps back in the tank, and distributed the rock rubble and "toys" into each trap. I put 10 gallons of new water in the tank and checked parameters again..... perfect and ready for hatchlings.

Hah! now I have to search each rock in the holding tub to find each hatchling and put them back in their separate breeding traps. I am so sick of not being able to see them easily - can I paint a neon stripe on each one, please????? I FINALLY found all five and put them in their separate containers. WHEW!

I'm not looking forward to spending two hours doing that every 2-3 days so next time I am going to have to do less of a tear-down. However, what I really worry about is the effect this cleaning had on the hatchlings.

1. Did having 50% of their water changed have a negative effect on them?
2. Did relocating them to a holding bin for a while and then back to the tank (and handling them twice) cause them any harm?
3. Obviously since I can't tell them apart they are probably not in the same habitat that they came out of before the water change.... is the new "home" and new "toys" upsetting to them? I fear that while they may have finally been getting comfortable in their new home (since their arrival Sunday) they are now back to square one being in what seems like a new home to them.

The only GOOD side I can think of is perhaps if I relocate them like this once or twice a week they will not become as territorial and protective of "their space" and maybe fight less when they escape their breeding traps?

Or is the ideal environment for a captive octopus to feel safe and secure and let him feel like he DOES get to protect his space and that no one will distrupt it?

Your thoughts, please?
Sue
 
I would allow them to feel territorial. We always say the more rock the better. It makes them feel secure and safe. If its their home then they will feel safer than if they might loose it every few days.

Is there no way to lift the breeders with the inklets still in them and into tank water in a bucket? That way you can name them and know their personality as time goes on. You will also be able to keep them separate with out fear of crushing them. Just a thought.
 
SabrinaR;173480 said:
Is there no way to lift the breeders with the inklets still in them and into tank water in a bucket? That way you can name them and know their personality as time goes on. You will also be able to keep them separate with out fear of crushing them. Just a thought.

I may try that next time but when the water leaves the breeder (either as I remove water from the tank or I start to lift the breeder out of the water) things in there shift. Since I have pieces of live rock in each one I'm afraid the inklets will get crushed by a moving rock when lifting out the breeders. Then when you lower the traps back into water, things swish and move again regardless of how slow and gentle you are. I decided a few minutes ago that I'm going to get online and order a bunch of the white net breeders and replace the plastic ones. The slits in the plastic ones are big enough for these guys to crawl through and they are all disappearing on me.
Sue
 
Well, it was a very distressing lunch break. I immediately started doing my search for hatchlings and the first one I found was easy to find - out in the open and lifeless. My heart sunk - I was SO not ready for that. (I had finally stopped worrying about that every hour of the day) I tapped him with a pipette and got no reaction.. he just swayed in the current. Totally white/translucent. I panicked and frantically tried to find some of the others to see if this was an isolated case or if I had somehow killed them all! Luckily I quickly found another who looked fine, and then another. So back to the lifeless one I went, and sucked him up with a turkey baster. I laid him on a piece of paper towel so that I could take some close-up photos of him before disposing of him and through the zoom lens I thought I saw a tentacle move! Not being sure (but hoping like hell) I quickly put him back in the water. He fell to the bottom of his trap and didn't move. I went about looking for the others and trying to feed them frozen mysis. I only found a total of four hatchlings so, again, one was missing in action. Apparently there is one (at least one) that breaks out of his trap and enjoys having run of the tank and hiding in the rock.

I tested the water and found it was .027. Probably not a big deal, but I siphoned out a gallon and put in a gallon of fresh RO/DI. I checked the lifeless one again, still hadn't moved. I went about tending to my other pets and checked him one more time before I left for the office. I THINK, if I look with a magnfiying glass, that he MIGHT be breathing. He also seems a tad darker in color than he was when I first found him.

I'm wracking my brain to figure out what caused his death/illness and my thoughts are:

1. Something about the water change didn't agree with him
2. He hasn't been eating and is dying of starvation
3. He got injured/crushed during the rock movement last night
4. He got attacked by one of his siblings (The breeder he was in was inhabited by another hatchling when I got home.) If there was a fight, would the "loser" be eaten or do they just fight for territory and then victor leaves the opponent to rot?

Don't know what to think, but am very distressed. I was a wreck worrying that I'd lose one the first few days I had them but I had just stopped obsessing over that. :frown:

Sue
 
I've been trying to piece together the cannibalistic syndrome through observation and other's direct reports. At this size, I am almost sure they don't "eat" each other because they don't eat anything even close to the size of a sibling. With my first very brief (the hatchlings did not survive the drive home) experience with O. briareus hatchlings, after a week small (just before we drove to Charleston to get them) red marks started appearing on the ones held in the main tank. The ones that showed these marks died within a day of showing the mantle marks. We assumed sibling attack but none of Kooahs hatchlings showed this kind of mark in any of the combinations of tanks I used so I have since wondered if it was bacterial.

Sarah has reported arms missing with the bimac dead and this sounds much more like what would be expected with sibling attack (and there is no other thing it could be in her tank other than deformity since the hatchlings are in a bare tank). I found and photographed one briareus hatchling (and there certainly could have been others) with an arm missing as well. An arm would be much more the size of food they could consume. I would guess that this kind of damage, this young, is probably fatal (the one I photographed was active and walking on the glass) but so many die in the first few weeks that it is hard to know. Where I put two hatchlings together and could easily observe them, when one died it was not touched by the surviving and did not look molested.

Hatchling octopus should be very easy to chew and digest. Most of the hatchlings in a brood simply disappear (however, we found many of Conannay's dead briareus hatchlings in Joe's tank and I accounted for most of Kooah's dead ones that were in small, observable tanks. Only the octos loose in the larger main tanks disappeared without a cadaver. This makes me think that the clean-up crews and not the other hatchlings make a meal of the dead.

I did notice that changing out the water in my small observation tanks seemed to be a negative factor and I would often see death less than 24 hours after a water change in the small tanks. My longest lived hatchlings (and the two that survived) were located in the main tanks that had either little or no water changes for several weeks at at time.
 

Shop Amazon

Shop Amazon
Shop Amazon; support TONMO!
Shop Amazon
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon and affiliated sites.
Back
Top