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Egg culture techniques

Chime (now we need a bell smiley). We JUST happen to have :biggrin2: a forum for discussing adventures with hatchlings and my latest is included in the list of posts. As CaptFish mentions successes with small egg species has never been accomplished with members and there are only a very few references to successes in labs or aquariums (and even then success does not include full life expectancy for the ones I have found). Large egg species are viable to try but we only have journals on a few attempts, Mama Cass and Tantanka being the latest surviving O. briareus journaled but we also have O. bimaculoides and O.mercatoris that are preforum journals. Roy et al have raised numerous large egg species in the lab at Berkeley and Steve has a number of successes with squid a AUT but we don't have journals on the student efforts.
 
I've had some success raising the following large egged octopuses from eggs:

Bathypolypus arcticus (a deep-sea octopus)
Octopus briareus Caribbean reef octopus
Octopus mercatoris (listed as O. joubini in older lit.)
Octopus bimaculoides (Two spot)

And no luck, so far, with the small egged species. As far as I know, of the small egged species, only GPOs and O. vulgaris have been raised.

Here in Hawaii, we are very far from continental influences – all of the near shore octopuses are small egged species. Species with planktonic offspring are much more likely to make it to remote island chains than offspring of large egged species.

For large egged octopuses, amphipods and or mysid shrimp work well as first foods.
 
I have an O. rubescens who very conveniently laid her eggs against the glass of our aquarium. She has been guarding them for over two months now and I thought they must be infertile. But each egg now sports a pair of eyes. Mother octo has furnished the area below her eggs with a pile of empty shells. I assume the babies will fall into this "habitat" when they hatch. I do not plan to mess with her care in any way. But I am wondering if there is a form of food critter I can introduce to the tank so the babies have prey. The tank already has populations of copepods, amphipods and other tine hard to seepods.
mcblsb
 
Sadly, this is a small egg species so the hatchlings will not be benthic for about a month. We have had no success with small egg species in the hobby and extremely limited success with only three species that I know of with ocean flow through systems (vulgaris in Europe with 4 out of some 20,000 hatchlings that survived to benthic, but not adult, two joubini in Texas, again no adult survivors and an Alaskan animal that I don't recall the species but it was not O. rubescens). We always try when presented with the opportunity and I believe the longest lived have been 21 days. However, more typical is less than a week.

The Alaskan success used new hatched crab zoe and thought this may be key. The lack of success for the hobbyist is generally accepted as try any and everything you might think of. Here is a post by @Taollan that may shed a bit of light on the difficulties (his master's thesis was centered on O. rubescens and he is now heading up a lab that will eventually tackle raising them again)
 
In vivo metabolism of unsaturated fatty acids in Octopus vulgaris hatchlings determined by incubation with 14C-labelled fatty acids added directly to seawater as protein complexes
D.B. Reis, N.G. Acosta, E. Almansa, J.C. Navarro, D.R. Tocher, O. Monroig, J.P. Andrade, A.V. Sykes, C. Rodríguez 2014 (subscription)

Abstract
The high mortalities observed during Octopus vulgaris paralarvae culture have been associated with a nutritional imbalance, with long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (LC-PUFA) appearing to have a critical role. In order to determine the in vivo capability of O. vulgaris hatchlings to incorporate and metabolise unsaturated fatty acids (FA), hatchlings were incubated in flat-bottom 6-well tissue culture plates at a density of 90 hatchlings/well in 10 mL of seawater (36 ‰). Incubations were performed with gentle stirring at 21 ºC for 6 h with 0.2 μCi (0.3 μM) of [1-14C]-labelled FA including 18:1n-9, 18:2n-6, 18:3n-3, 20:4n-6 (ARA), 20:5n-3 (EPA) or 22:6n-3 (DHA), which were added directly to the seawater as their potassium salts bound to bovine serum albumin (BSA). A control treatment without [1-14C]FA was also assessed. O. vulgaris hatchlings not only possessed the ability to incorporate FA bound to BSA, but also to esterify them into phospholipid, with marked specificity. [1-14C]DHA and [1-14C]C18 FA substrates were mainly esterified into phosphatidylcholine, while [1-14C]ARA and [1-14C]EPA were esterified into phosphatidylethanolamine. The majority of radioactivity from [1-14C]FA incorporated into hatchling total lipid was recovered as unmodified FA with elongation being the only metabolism detected. Of the FA investigated, [1-14C]ARA was the most efficiently incorporated into hatchling lipids, but it was also the least modified FA. The fact that no desaturation activity was recorded towards the FA tested in this experiment may indicate that the nutritional requirements of O. vulgaris hatchlings in terms of FA are highly specific and LC-PUFA must be considered essential dietary nutrients.
 
Hi my blue ring left me around 100 eggs in a cave and iv been warned about the dangers but I'm cloud up enough to take care. The eggs will be hatching within a week at a guess I'm completely in prepared for this but still I don't think not to try to keep them is an option. Am I correct in thinking that it best to use nursery tanks only shallow filled and I was thinking just to use a pump and air stone for movement/oxygen and stock the tank water with brine shrim copypods and any other tiny bit of food I can. Iv been informed this has never been successfully done but still want to go ahead. Any extra help appreciated.
 
I'm definitely not a blue ring expert, but I do know there have been some cases where someone had contact with water in which a blue ring had died and then had a reaction. If you are doing water changes, you need to be extremely careful to protect yourself from contact with the water.

Well, it appears you only have to worry if they are dead. See this thread. Blue Ring Venom
 
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