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Food for new borns

370HSSV

Hatchling
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Feb 6, 2013
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I was just reading some texts about ATS filters and it seems that it bi-produce a lot of little insect like organisms, Would it help providing snacks / extra Food for the new born Cuttles?

PS. in the Photo, the largest one is about 3mm in length.
 

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those look like copeapods, not shure but i think that some or most cuttles have dificulty catching them
amphipods seem to be a good supliment but mysid shrimp seem to be the manditory food for hatchlings to survive
 
I agree, those are copepods. They are very small, and a ton would have to be eaten for a single cuttlefish to benefit. Also, it may be difficult catching such small prey. Stick with the mysids and amphipods.
 
They look like they could be small amphipods, although hard to tell from the pic. Copepods tend to be more teardrop shaped (or at least have a stubbier thorax), whereas amphipods are more cigar shaped (and have a curved spine) (see pics linked below). I shook out my Chaeto into my breeder nets and the 1-4 week old cuttles gobbled up the amphipods I had living in my sump. Richard Ross recommends here that the first week should be mysids, but after that the cuttles are good enough hunters and they should not have too many issues with the more "robust" amphipods. In a later article, he states the amphipods might even damage very young cuttles.

"typical" copepod

"typical" amphipod

BTW, here is an article that looked at survival rates of S. Officinalis when feed amphipods versus mysids.
 
Thanks for the copepod/amphipod links. I believe I have been calling amphipods copepods all this time! :oops:

There are a few more articles on first food comparisons here and I added the link to the PDF to the abstract reference to this article.
 
When I first got into the hobby a few years ago, the guys at the LFS called all of the little tiny critters in reef tanks copepods. I did too until I did some reading on it. While it's not taxonomically correct to call amphipods copepods, it seems (at least anecdotally) to be part of the layman terminology in the reefing hobby.

Technically, while both are of the Subphylum Crustacea, Amphipods are in the class Malacostraca and Copepods are in the class Maxillopoda.
 
Thank you all for the information, Im looking forward to host a few Cuttle Tanks, while there are millions of these Copepods / Amphipods in the current tank, I was wondering if it would be a possible food source.

Now I know that it is not a good feed for them and I wont be wasting cuttle lives trying find out if they can catch the Copepods / Amphipods.

Thanks all!
 

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