[Cuttlefish Eggs]: Let's play

ceph

Wonderpus
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Dec 20, 2002
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Location
West Palm Beach, Florida
Step 1: Creating a Space

That center shelf above the refugium is new.

ASpace.jpg
 
Full disclosure; I decided the same thing. I designed it but had a local professional build the tank. He makes high end acrylic furniture for wealthy clients. And custom tanks and gadgets for me and my aquarium clients.
 
Full disclosure; I decided the same thing. I designed it but had a local professional build the tank.

That is both sad and reassuring. I suspect it would not be all that bad with the right equipment but an disaster in the making without it.

Now for the question I have been wanting to ask but expected you to post if the answer was yes. Can you get local octopuses on request?
 
The guy that built the tank has a few hundred thousand invested in acrylic working equipment and decades of experience. Yeah, with time and equipment, I could probably have made something and it would work (hold water, do the job) but it wouldn't look like the professional job that it is. Sometimes it is best to go with experts; I got exactly what I wanted and it looks fantastic.

This tank is intended for cuttlefish eggs and grow outs. I'm focusing on importing and aquaculture right now which for me are *much* better options than collecting/purchasing, housing and shipping individual wild caught octopuses. I don't have any special local octopus sources. Where I used to collect 30 years ago, under the Blue Heron bridge, is now protected and besides, Octogirl does her research there.

I do have contacts with some of the best aquarium wholesale importers in the business.

Perhaps sometime down the road, I'll work with locally sourced Caribbean Reef Octopuses eggs and hatchlings again. And or design and have built a custom octopus tank.

Lots of balls in the air right now. This is my "play tank".
 
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Hi! I was wondering if you know of any sort of marine life that could help me control this runaway amphipod and mysid shrimp colony I've amassed? :^D

No, seriously, I'm just checking in. How is your play tank project going? Have you had any luck getting any cephs in and/or identificating them? We are still very highly interested in starting a cuttlefish colony.

We also have some hermit crabs in our system that are getting far too comfortable.

Cheers! -Jim
 
You’re fortunate to have a big supply of amphipods and mysid shrimp. It’s the difficulty finding this type of small food that hinders people in the first months trying to raise cuttlefish.

My Octopus bimaculoides loved amiphipods when she was very young, but would also eat them as she found them when she was full grown. They must have been a good snack!

Nancy
 
Hi Nancy!

Yeah, we've been encouraging the pod population specifically in anticipation of Dr. Wood's entreprenurial project. :smile:

Back when I first raised my hatchling O. joubini/mercatoris project in 1996 or so, I actually built a rack of 2 liter bottles and used it to cultivate the food chain. The top level was a culture of greenwater, which fed a culture of rotifers on the 2nd level. The enriched rotifers were fed to copepods on the 3rd level. The 4th level was anything I could get my hands on: lysmatid shrimp larvae, pods, fiddler crab larvae. It was a lot of work, and it worked great up until the second month. Those blasted juvie octos just quit eating anything at all around week 6.
 

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