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feeder food attacking cuttles

squishy1

Blue Ring
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Mar 21, 2012
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Is it possible for a mysid shrimp to attack and wound a 14 day old cuttlefish? I came home to see what looked like one of my cuttles eating a mysid shrimp, only to see the shrimp swim away a couple seconds later and what looks like a chunk missing in between the eyes and the tentacles of the cuttle. He showed some peculiar swimming habits after, unlike what any of the others have done so far. He also keeps bumping into the side of the net breeder he's in now.

I started off with 7 two weeks ago, and lost one the following day, my guess is due to the local fish store feeding them live brine. As soon as I got them I started them on mysids, and I also tried amphipods but they weren't very interested in those. I read about stocking density of live feeders to cuttles should be about 2 to 1, but the only way I got all of the babies interested in feeding was stocking about 30-40 mysids in the breeder net with the cuttles.

From what I can tell they aren't meeting their feeding quota of about 2 mysids a day, especially for 2 weeks old. i think they're lucky if they get 1 a day currently. From watching them, they seem to miss their prey with their feeder tentacles 95% of the time.
 
If the babies are not eating enough, they will start to float. Is there a way to separate them in groups of 2-3 cuttlefish per breeder net? I would definitely separate the injured one. I think it is more likely that another cuttle caused the injury, but I wouldn't rule out the mysid.

Oh, they miss a lot in the beginning...
 
While usually I would say that the cuttle had problems and the mysid is taking advantage of them, with a stocking density of 40 to 1 in a breeder net it could be the other way. Mysid's are carnivores and they need to eat, so if you aren't specifically feeding them you could have issues.
I am not a fan of keeping food in with cephs all the time, for the above reasons and because the ceph can become accustomed to the prey and then not eat it. They may also just be overwhelmed with the constant action. If it were me, I would scale back on the prey items and not worry so much if I didn't see the hatchlings actually eat. For the first month or so S. bandensis may not appear interested in eating, but they almost always do.
 
the stocking density is 5 or 6 mysids to 1 cuttlefish, when i said 40 i meant 40 total for all 7 cuttles (6 now) in the breeder net. looking at them this morning I am noticing they are a little bit bigger, plus the number of mysids is shrinking. unfortunately the one that got attacked i found dead this morning, along with 2 others. 1 of which was the largest of the group, and the body is engourged, almost as if it tried eating the biggest mysid in the net and it choked trying to swallow it. down to 3 babies now...kinda depressing.
 
Still to high a ratio of food sitting around - maybe think of sitting in a room with 6 friends and 40 chickens.
If you still have any...I would pull all the mysis, and then introduce only a few the next day.
Sorry for your losses, the largest one sounds like it autolized and started to decompose as cuttles really don't eat in a way they can choke.
 
Unfortunately none of the little guys ended up surviving past the 1 month mark. I wanted to give it one more try, so I did some prepping for a new batch of 35 eggs I ordered. I setup a 20 gallon tank just for the cuttles, along with the addition of amphipod cultures to start them off for the first few days. The mysids seemed a little too aggressive towards the cuttles so wanted to give them something that wouldnt fight back as much to start with for the first few days. I also did some research showing that whatever food items the cuttles see while in the eggs are what they tend to go after once hatched, so I have the feeder cultures up against the back of the 20 gallon so the pre-hatched babies see their prey before they hatch. Supposed to be getting the eggs in mail tomorrow morning.
 
The see food before they hatch concept is interesting and at least one member did try it but without any detectable success with the bandensis (note that the official experiments were done with a different, larger species). More experimentation along this line is certainly desired as getting them to eat early seems to be the biggest problem.
 

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