Durzo - A. aculeatus

iAlex

Vampyroteuthis
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Joined
Aug 31, 2010
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437
No name yet, I'm working on it. :wink:

I saw a curled third arm during the drip so I am almost positive I have a boy. Very small, mantle the size of a grape, arms just a few inches, you can use the air-line tubing for a reference. :grad:

These are the shots I got during acclimation:

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He ate a crab while in the bucket, but since he is small I'm going to see if I can find some small fiddlers tomorrow.
When he stayed the light brown color, then 'went spiky and stuff', to quote my family. :roll: After a few seconds he changed to a dark color (the last picture), he didn't stay out long enough to get a good picture of it.

Here is a video I got:
 
I am always encouraged when they eat before release. This may be more of a nervous reaction but antecdotally (without actually having kept a record) I think I have had better success when they eat at the end of acclimation. I also feel less concerned if they don't accept food for a day or two. Whether this is good for the animal or good for the mental state of the keeper, I can't say :roll:

:fingerscrossed: on it being male but that looks like a plum more than a grape :wink:
 
I've never had a plum. :lol:

I figured it would be a good idea to try to feed because I didn't think I would see much of him for a few days.
 
Just had a sighting... When I was looking, I saw two eyes staring at me out from the bottom of a rock. :lol:

...
And right after I posted that I went out to check again and he was just chilling on the front glass... He is a little smaller than a tennis ball when he was all curled up. He was chowing down on the fiddler for awhile, it took him probably an hour or so to be completely done with it.
 
He has come out between midnight and 4 am for two nights in a row now.

We went collecting for crabs today, it was rough. When I got there it was raining so hard that you couldn't see past a few feet. We waited it out for an hour or so and it cleared up, and then we started looking. After ten minutes we had only seen a few and hadn't caught any and we realized we had no idea what we were doing. We decided to start flipping rocks, and there they all were... We ended up getting about two dozen crabs, but we scraped our hands all up from the rocks. Hopefully this will last us awhile.
 
We tried to collect fiddlers a few year ago in Charleston. We could see a few but catching them was not very successful. A TONMO member (we were there to attempt to bring home 1 week old O. briareus - not successful unfortunately) helped us get a few but the local bait shop had tons (shipped in from FL - they cannot be commercially collected in Charleston). Other than the experience, the bait shop was the way to go. They were cheap and plentiful :biggrin2:
 
Here are the best pictures I could get of his time on the glass last night, if he comes out tonight I'll try to get a video of him going after a crab. (The red LEDs aren't really that bright, it is just how it came out on the camera)

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So around 11:30 tonight and I go to check on the tank and right as I go around the corner into the tank room I see him shoot back into the rocks. He was probably only about 6" out of the rocks, but that is the earliest he has been out in the week since I've gotten him. :biggrin2:
 
I finally found (and fed) Yeti, tonight just a few minutes ago ... check the time stamp :biggrin2:

Hopefully this is a young animal and not one of the similar looking smaller nocturnals (Espy was the later).
 
My guy ate a fiddler last night before midnight, and I tried krill on a stick tonight since he was out on the glass early tonight. He took it. :mrgreen:

I haven't had the light on the past few days and he is coming out earlier and earlier, I don't know if he is warming up to me or it's because of the lights.


Can you change the name to 'Durzo'? I'm going to nerd it up and name him after my favorite character in a book. :roll:
 
I found a bait shop that sells a dozen fiddlers for $3.75 and shrimp for $2-$6 for a dozen depending on their size. I guess my catching crabs days are gone. :lol:
 
Yep, that was the way we saw it too. When we are anywhere near the coast, we look for a bait shop and load up. I had hopes that we would find crawfish like that here but I have found exactly 2 and I walked in just in time to rescue them from the live bass bait fish that were going to get them as a meal. I would not have gotten those if I had not heard them talking in the back and rushed to the backroom tanks immediately :shock:
 
I haven't seen him in the day time yet, and it seems most aculeatus are out fairly soon which is making me think he's a nocturnal dwarf. He is eating good, I've gotten him to take a mysis (more from actually just seeing if he will eat it vs. a staple diet). He are a big fiddler last night, I will try to film him getting a small one if he comes out tonight.
 

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