Octogon - ?O.Mercatoris New octopus!

I have good news and bad news.:wink: Okay so this morning I walked ove to his aquarium to see if there was any activity,and when I looked in there were eggs!!!:heee: That is the good news,the bad news is that he or should I say she will die soon.:cry:
 
Pictures? Eggs don't move about so hopefully we will see them since you can. I have had two sets of mercatoris hatchlings but have never seen the eggs :roll:. We have never IDed this one though have we? There are two common Caribbean dwarfs and may be others that are only seen on occassion. The joubini is a small egg species where the mercs are probably the easiest (and don't mistake that as easy) to succeed with keeping a few of the hatchlings alive. Four to five survivors has been our best mortality rate with varying numbers of initial hatchlings.

Since she has only been in the aquarium for about 2 months there is a good chance the eggs will be fertile. If she is a merc, you can expect 8 - 10 weeks incubation time. If incubation is only 2 weeks or less then she is likely a small egg species and survival rates so far are 0.
 
The size would obvious to be honest. The small eggs are as small as a grain of rice if I remember correctly while large eggs look like amber droplets. I could be mistaken as I didnt take pictures of HP's eggs and wasnt really sure if they were in fact eggs.
 
I have only seen a cluster of small eggs once (and have mentioned I did not see the merc eggs) and they appeared almost round. However, Roy had a cluster at the same time and he confirmed his were tear drop shaped. Maya's eggs (small egg species and infertile) were probably the size of the top of a round top push pin where Kooah's (O. briareus - large egg) were roughly the size of the barrel on a barrel shaped push pin (maybe slightly smaller) but merc eggs may be smaller as they don't actually come in two standard sizes. When mercs hatch they will go immediatley to the tank wall and will look like a hungry (ie flat) white tick and are only slightly larger so they are pretty small BUT they will look like an octopus where the photos I have seen of the small egg species show them as almost transparent with arms that are not well defined and few suckers (mercs will have a full complement) and they will stay in the water column rather than seeking the substrate.
 
Thanks for all the info! I just looked at the eggs and they looked like round teardrops. I'm guessing there is about 100 eggs.I am going to to my lfs today. I will update later.:smile:
 
My original female (Trapper) ate most of the way through her brood cycle and then would eat Cyclop-eeze after the eggs hatched (there is kind of a cool video of her "sucking" in Cyclop-eeze from a pipette). There was a progression from live to dead over the 10 weeks and once she stopped taking one thing, I would try another. Her daughter, unfortunately, would not eat anything I offered directly (she may have eaten Cyclop-eeze though).
 

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