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dwarf octo- Eggs hatched!!

laynrockers

Cuttlefish
Registered
Joined
Feb 7, 2012
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19
Hey guys, Thought i would re-post here since the other thread was in the wrong location. If you check out my first post you can read the whole back story, any way got my first octo back in Feburary. Since then i have found out it was a dwarf octo and last night its eggs hatched after about a month of brooding and not eating. Also i know it is hard to get any of them to survive but i think i have a rare chance given that i have a few hundred baby crabs in the same tank that must have been larvae that came in on one of the live feeder fidler crabs. They are small enough for the babies to eat. I would love to hear from you guys on anything to do to help them survive. Since they were getting sucked into the drain valve, i shut off the pump and skimmer. and put an air stone in. the mother is still alive but i know that doesnt last longer than a week. really something to watch this. Hope to get some good links and info from you all.. Thanks
 

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Good luck with them. Crab zoae are one of the best possible feeds (or atleast the only thing I have read about with any success) and plain impossible to get so you are ahead of most of us attempting - intentionally or not - to be the first TONMOer to succeed with one of the small egg animals. Had she been an O. mercatoris (she may have been O. joubini and I am thinking this may have been the case given the supplier) the hatchlings would look like small ticks instead of fleas :biggrin2: and the arms would have been well developed with visible suckers and more length.

If you get a couple to live a few days, start looking for other small foods as your crabs won't last long. I had ordered rotifers (may be too small) but had lost all the octos when they arrived. Live mysid work for cuttles so they are probably worth putting into the tank as well. Rotifers can be cultured and are herbavors where mysid cultures are difficult at best however, I am not sure either provide enough nutrition.

GOOD LUCK :fingerscrossed: and PLEASE let us know what you observe.

PS I added a link back to your acquisition thread to your original post for the hatchlings.
 
Thanks d whatley,

Well at most i counted 14, this was at about 6am PST yesterday. They seemed to be doing well following the current in the tank and continued to stay towards the top riding it like a disney ride just having fun. this lasted for about 8-12 hours then one by one they started to dwindle down to 6 then 4 then 1. By this time i had shut off both pumps and clogged to tube to my sump. I put an air stone in the tank to help, It was really sad seeing a few up them get sucked up by the bulk head (drain fitting). So after that i had the turn the pumps down. So far I havent seen them and am hoping they settled down in the rocks are are eating.

But my tank is a 75gallon and they are sooooo small that even if they were out crawling around the rocks it would be hard to tell. I have about 300lbs of live rock/base rock in the tank and was thinking the octo i got would be much larger.

One strange behavior i noticed was one of the babies would sink down towards a rock and when flowting about an inch or two above it would jump in and hit the rock then seem to jjet off of it. I didnt know if it saw some tiny crab and was eating ?? But it was strange compared to the rest just jetting around and hovering toward the top.

No sign the the momma, she has continued to hide in her den and only occasionally waved her arm out. :frown:
 
Not having any success at all with the small one, I can't validate but from what I understand the small egg species stay pelagic (live in the water column) for about a month. I noticed a couple of mine hovering close to the bottom substrate but I did not take that as a good sign. IME (O. mercatoris and O. briareus) the large egg, more fully formed animals do, indeed, go to ground after about 24 hours and stop coming to the sides at night after about a week.
 

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