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- Mar 8, 2004
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KLtcb;122655 said:thats awesome. i was reading i think on here an article about octopus care and it said that even unmated females can lay infertile eggs. which means that they arent hatchable? is it just luck that you buy a female and its already pregnent and then has babies? it seems that since their lifespans are unfortunetley short, it would be very cool to raise the babies and just keep it goin.. how does that work?
It's usually bad luck. Octopuses can store sperm for months, so if the octo was wild-caught, she will most likely lay fertile eggs. Unfortunately, (almost all) octos die shortly after laying eggs, and the babies are very hard to raise in captivity. Large-egged octos are difficult but possible, with a whole lot of effort, resources, food cost, and so forth (and even then they have a relatively low success rate) and small-egged species have never been raised anywhere except in a professional laboratory (we get someone trying every few months, and no one has been successful.)
To hear about some successes with large egged species, look at gholland's and dwhatley's posts about their mercatoris mothers, Varys and Trapper. Mercatoris are not the most sociable octos, though, although with these examples they seem easier to raise to adulthood than other large-egged species. Zyan's experience is described in the TFH "ceph issue" article, but I don't think it's online anywhere yet.