• Looking to buy a cephalopod? Check out Tomh's Cephs Forum, and this post in particular shares important info about our policies as it relates to responsible ceph-keeping.

buying cephs

Joined
Apr 12, 2008
Messages
11
i have been doing some reading and ive got some questions. firstly, which is easier to care for, an octo or a cuttlefish? second, ive read some breif things about pygmy octos, what is keeping them like? and can one be kept in a 10 gal tank? or how many in a 55? and finally...what are some good online sites to buy cephs from?
 
singapore;115030 said:
i have been doing some reading and ive got some questions. firstly, which is easier to care for, an octo or a cuttlefish? second, ive read some breif things about pygmy octos, what is keeping them like? and can one be kept in a 10 gal tank? or how many in a 55? and finally...what are some good online sites to buy cephs from?

Most of the care requirements for cuttles and octos are pretty similar, so it's not clear that one is easier to keep than another. Cuttles don't escape, so not having to escape-proof the tank is sort of an advantage, but they have similar food and filtration requirements.

dwarf and pygmy octos are generally less desirable as pets for a number of reasons: they tend to be shy and nocturnal, so they're less interactive, they have a shorter lifespan and are most often collected as adults, and some are very aggressive biters. A lot of people ask about them because they see the larger tank size as a frustration, but really, the medium-sized octos like bimacs, briareus, hummelincki, and aculeatus in a larger tank make better pets.

We don't recommend any ceph be kept in a 10 gallon tank. Even for a dwarf octo or a single bandensis, we suggest at least a 29gal, and for one of the octos I listed above, a 55-75gal would be the range. We also don't recommend keeping more than one octo together, although it sometimes works out OK, particularly if they've been raised as siblings, but sometimes they'll kill each other... normally in the wild, they're fairly solitary. If you're interested in multiple cephs in one tank, cuttles are a more natural choice, although even they will have occasional cannibalism.

The "octopus availability" and "cuttlefish availability" threads are the best information about places to buy cephs, but unfortunately, most cephs available for sale are poorly or even incorrectly identified, so what you'll get is often a gamble. The ideal thing is to buy a tank-raise juvenile ceph, but right now no one is doing that commercially, although we have a few members raising briareus, mercatoris (a dwarf), and bandensis cuttles right now, but there's no guarantee that any of those would be available when you have a tank set up and cycled, so it's probably best to keep an eye on the availability threads as your tank's getting ready, and choose something appropriate that's available right then.
 

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