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Did anybody here ever get juniors from your adult octopuses in your tanks? - If yes did they survive and grow up?
Do you know anybody that experienced this?
Oh yes. I raised a clutch of baby O. mercatoris back in the 90's. Octos come in two flavors: large egged and small egged. Small egged octopuses hatch out into nearly microscopic critters that are swept away by the current, but you have a shot at rearing large egged hatchlings. They're about the size of a BB, and will eat tiny crustaceans....if you can find some. That's the whole problem: feeding a tiny but voracious predator. The amphipods that invariably inhabit our tanks are WAY too large. I started mine on copepods and brine shrimp nauplii enhanced with Selco, but as they grew their tastes changed. At around 6 weeks they started refusing everything I could obtain- peppermint shrimp larvae, brine shrimp, fiddler and red crab larvae and even a plankton trawl from the Chesapeake bay. We also attempted to rear the hatchlings of a small indonesian macropus obtained from Blue Zoo, but we couldn't get those babies to eat anything.
The mercatoris project happened long before I had a digital camera, so theer's no photography, but we did shoot a couple of the micro babies. In this one, you can see him slam into one of the baby amphipods we tried to feed him.
We have not had any journalled hatchlings for quite a long time but here is a link to an O. briareus success (mine). If you filter the Cephalopod Journals forum for Octopus Eggs, you will see a few others. There are also a few successes with O. bimaculatus scattered in the journals.
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