- Joined
- Jun 12, 2004
- Messages
- 88
Well recently I have been bummed because of my loss of OCTOROK obviously. I did a really large water change, algae scraped the tank, and had these fiddlers establish themselves in some hiding places. I'd been taking my time on making another order from octopets, and had been somewhat worrying about putting a baby octopus in with these crabs and all that, so I wanted some time to 'sleep on' what I would do next.
Well, as it always seems, things worked out for me better than I could ever have imagined!!!!!!!!!!!!
On friday I finally went to this far away 'legendary fish store' that everybody has been recommended to me, because I wanted to get an exotic betta. This place was insane, they had about 15 types of plecos (I ended up picking up an L333, 'yellow king tinger plec', so cool), a huge area of exotic bettas for $2.99 (I got a light/dark/medium blue, white, green, with orange gills crowntail. Unbelievable!!!), and in their dry goods section I saw aquarium lighting, which I want to upgrade in my 120g FW to be a bit brighter. Their staff was happy to plug in bulbs into a universal-sized fixture to show me how they looked -- this was really really cool I thought.
Now the part of the store that obviously COMPLETELY floored me -- they had FOUR octopus for sale!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I have never seen ONE, or any SINGLE LFS that would even take an ORDER for one before, so this was completely new to me.
They had a bimac and I thought, 'well awesome I can at least get this guy and save myself some money/octo stress from shipping from octopets', but then I saw they had even more! They had a tank with one small bodied very long/thin legged octpus, with 2 labels 'small octopus' and 'bali octopus'. I believe this may have been briaerius from the descriptions I had read/seen, but hard to know for sure of course. In the next tank they had two octopus side by side, both labelled as 'octopus joubini'. I chose the larger of the two to take home
It has been named by my girlfriend, and is 'octavia' and a girl. She was much larger than expected when I saw her really stretch out in the jar she came in!!!!!!! My friend took a picture using his camera phone, which I will attach at the end of this.
I am looking for an ID on the species; I have a feeling it is actually not joubini. octavia's mantle I would guess is about 3 inches (~7.5 cm) which exceeds the max size for a joubini. Also cephbase does not show any mature pictures of this species, so it's hard to make the match. However, the red look and size for rubescens seems to match much more closely.
At first while acclimiating, the octopus did not move much and would not come out of the jar. When I came home hours later I noticed a severed fiddler crab claw in the tank and a crab carcass, and octavia was moving the sand around to burrow underneath live rock!!!! I notice a lot of sand was blown around by her, and she has pulled a large rock in to cover the opening of her den. Really neat stuff! When I woke up this morning I saw that another crab had become prey.
I can't remember if I had the light off last night when I left for several hours or not, but I have a feeling that this octopus is nocturnal from what I have seen so far. Of course, it has only been a day or so, so I have no real idea of its 'normal' behavior.
Robert & octavia
Well, as it always seems, things worked out for me better than I could ever have imagined!!!!!!!!!!!!
On friday I finally went to this far away 'legendary fish store' that everybody has been recommended to me, because I wanted to get an exotic betta. This place was insane, they had about 15 types of plecos (I ended up picking up an L333, 'yellow king tinger plec', so cool), a huge area of exotic bettas for $2.99 (I got a light/dark/medium blue, white, green, with orange gills crowntail. Unbelievable!!!), and in their dry goods section I saw aquarium lighting, which I want to upgrade in my 120g FW to be a bit brighter. Their staff was happy to plug in bulbs into a universal-sized fixture to show me how they looked -- this was really really cool I thought.
Now the part of the store that obviously COMPLETELY floored me -- they had FOUR octopus for sale!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I have never seen ONE, or any SINGLE LFS that would even take an ORDER for one before, so this was completely new to me.
They had a bimac and I thought, 'well awesome I can at least get this guy and save myself some money/octo stress from shipping from octopets', but then I saw they had even more! They had a tank with one small bodied very long/thin legged octpus, with 2 labels 'small octopus' and 'bali octopus'. I believe this may have been briaerius from the descriptions I had read/seen, but hard to know for sure of course. In the next tank they had two octopus side by side, both labelled as 'octopus joubini'. I chose the larger of the two to take home
It has been named by my girlfriend, and is 'octavia' and a girl. She was much larger than expected when I saw her really stretch out in the jar she came in!!!!!!! My friend took a picture using his camera phone, which I will attach at the end of this.
I am looking for an ID on the species; I have a feeling it is actually not joubini. octavia's mantle I would guess is about 3 inches (~7.5 cm) which exceeds the max size for a joubini. Also cephbase does not show any mature pictures of this species, so it's hard to make the match. However, the red look and size for rubescens seems to match much more closely.
At first while acclimiating, the octopus did not move much and would not come out of the jar. When I came home hours later I noticed a severed fiddler crab claw in the tank and a crab carcass, and octavia was moving the sand around to burrow underneath live rock!!!! I notice a lot of sand was blown around by her, and she has pulled a large rock in to cover the opening of her den. Really neat stuff! When I woke up this morning I saw that another crab had become prey.
I can't remember if I had the light off last night when I left for several hours or not, but I have a feeling that this octopus is nocturnal from what I have seen so far. Of course, it has only been a day or so, so I have no real idea of its 'normal' behavior.
Robert & octavia