Medium-sized cuttles?

[Shanks]

I'm doing my preliminary research for keeping cuttlefish, and I'm at the stage where I'm looking for a good species to keep. The tank I have on hand is 135 gallons (36wx24dx36h), and what I'm reading, mostly about S. officinalis and S. bandensis is that officinalis is too big for 135g, and bandensis would be like a speck in that tank. I'm ideally looking for something large enough that I can train it to manipulate objects with its arms, in the medium-size range.

Do any of you know of some species off-hand that can guide my research? If it turns out that I'm really just limited in my choices by that size tank, I'm not so far along that I can't ditch it and get a larger one.

Thanks!

 

[Shanks]

Oh, I want to state for the record that I'm not going off to buy a cuttle just to plop it into an unfinished tank... I'm looking WAY down the line to make sure I can house what I want to house before I go buying lights and skimmers and build a stand and all that. My timeline is to have this tank stocked in a year.

 

[Thales]

What tank size can you have and how many animals are you looking to use?

BTW, welcome!

 

[Shanks]

What tank size can you have and how many animals are you looking to use?

BTW, welcome!

Thanks! I have the space for up to maybe 1000 gallons? That'd be if I build a plywood/fiberglass tank, but more realistically I could do 300-400 and still have room to walk around in my basement, plus I dunno how well the drain tile of my house can support four tons of water....

Now that I think about it I'd love to do a 330g bowfront like the one the store I work at has. Ours is scratched to hell (darn little kids) but I really like the effect the bow has on the appearance of the livestock; it tends to magnify them, depending on how severe the bow is. Good stuff.

I think what's likely to happen is that I'll clear the freshwater riffraff out of my 29g and aim to get some S. bandensis or M. pfefferi in there to get some real-world experience with cuttles under my belt before going for the gusto on a huge tank.

My ultimate goal is S. officinalis or S. latimanus, probably a trio, in hopes that they'll breed. I really like the way S. latimanus hunts, mesmerizing its prey... so awesome. I'd love to see that in an aquarium.