• Looking to buy a cephalopod? Check out Tomh's Cephs Forum, and this post in particular shares important info about our policies as it relates to responsible ceph-keeping.

OCTOPUS: COMMON CAUSE OF DEATH

I think that it could be a case of bad diet from birth.

I do a lot of Seahorse breeding and have recently started breeding Hippocampus reidi, they live happily and grow fantasticly for around 3 months and then they all die, religiously... over the space of around 1 week I can lose hundreds.

Some were sent hor histology and turns out they are filling themselves up on artemia nauplii and not on the copeopods. With seahorses not having stomachs (a little problem) and the artemia being of very little use as a good source of nutrition we changed to diet to copeopods and nothing else and they are fine now and have been around for about 7 months! YAY

In short, they may eat fine to start with but they may eat some of the wrong food and have no room left for something thats actually nutritious.

~Andy
 
Interesting, Andy! Those artemia must have been quite tasty! Thanks for telling us about this.

Although I don't know all the details in all the cases, I know of at least two cases in which the baby bimacs were well nourished and then died, kept by people who had previously raised a wild-caught bimac successfully.

Nancy
 
Andy Lister said:
I think that it could be a case of bad diet from birth.

I do a lot of Seahorse breeding and have recently started breeding Hippocampus reidi, they live happily and grow fantasticly for around 3 months and then they all die, religiously... over the space of around 1 week I can lose hundreds.

Some were sent hor histology and turns out they are filling themselves up on artemia nauplii and not on the copeopods. With seahorses not having stomachs (a little problem) and the artemia being of very little use as a good source of nutrition we changed to diet to copeopods and nothing else and they are fine now and have been around for about 7 months! YAY

In short, they may eat fine to start with but they may eat some of the wrong food and have no room left for something thats actually nutritious.

~Andy

This is a little of the ceph topic........sorry boss don't :nofeet: me!

Andy we use rotifers for our newborn H. abdomenalis Then gradually move to amphipods, mysids, euphausids and crab larvae. Only use Artemia when the weather's too bad to put out plankton nets etc and then we fortify it. Our current display animals are now trained to take frozen euphausids a great advantage over winter!!! With this we can have about 95% survival through to adolescence (unless the power goes down and the O2 levels drop :x )

With baby cephs we use much the same diet but skip the rotifers and add in larval and juvenile fish. All fairly nutritious stuff but we still have unexplained deaths. When you consider that a female octi is capable (in some species) of laying 10's of 1000's of eggs (and more!) then the odds are that the majority will die no matter what we do. Having said that we don't breed cephs all that often. Our main display ceph is the large octi Pinnoctopus cordiformis and they're not very tolerant about sharing tank space with another ........typically within a half hour or so we'll have 1 left .......and that one has had a good meal :shock:


Anyhow that's my little :grad: for now I'll get off my soap box!!

J
 
The kuda seahorses that Mykela (my other half) kept were seen eating some artemia and later on the Artemia were seen again passing straight through still alive.

Feeding brine shrimp to animals is like feeding them packets of crisps (chips) all day :mrgreen:

Andy, speak to Keith about Corophium volutator, its what we used in the end and what i used for baby briareus octos...

:smile:
 

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