Pulpopus - A. aculeatus

Roy has a lot of lab experience with A. aculeatus and not succeeded in raising the young (nor have any of our hobbiest members). I believe 21 days is the longest any hatchlings have survived and the most reported time has been about a week. I have seen three studies with minimal success rearing small egg vulgaris, joubini and a forgotten Alaskan species. I believe two of the three were reared in flow through sea water tanks but don't recall if the Texas study on joubini was a synthetic water environment. I do remember the Alaskan paper commenting on using a particular crab larvae as food and attributed that, at least in part, to their success. Unfortunately, I seem to have lost reference to the article.

TONMO members have had limited success with a few popular and aquarium safe large egg species. To the best of my recollection, members have raised O. mercatoris, O. chierchiae, O. bimaculoides and O. brieareus with O. bimaculoides having the largest number of surviving offspring.
 
So I'm back from South Carolina, brought some treats back for pulpopus. Some fiddlers and some ghost shrimp. Here are some new pics and 3 vids. I gave him his first fiddler yesterday and did not have my camera on hand, so I missed that one, he got it even before it hit the bottom and ate it all. It was really interesting how he would spit the shell and legs and stuff all on the same spot, away from his den.
 

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In the past few days, he has been actively hunting the ghost shrimp. He ignored them at first and ate all the hermits and snails, after that he was happy eating fiddler crabs. We have a limited supply of them so we stopped giving him those on a regular basis. So now he has been focusing his attention on the 10 or so ghost shrimp I put in his tank, it has been amazing to watching him ambush and catch them. Here is tonight's vid.
 
Have you tried feeding a little table shrimp (raw). Most octos will eat it (at least after a certain age, very young ones seem to find it too tough). It helps a lot with the budget and it is appropriate food to add to the mix.
 
Howdy folks, I have been absent for a while, life just got too busy all of a sudden. Pulpo is still alive and kicking, I ran out of live stuff but he has been eating frozen shrimp and fish. Some times he eats it really good and some times he touches the food and then swims away. I brought home some tiny micro shrimp and let them go on the octo tank, thinking they would multiply and once pulpo passes away I can get sepia eggs and hatch them in that tank, giving the baby sepias tiny shrimp to eat. Well the tiny shrimp really took off and now they totally cover the tank. Pulpo tries to catch them but I have never seen him manage to catch one of them. I tried to take pictures of them but they move too fast and I have to zoom really close to get a good look at them and it did not work out. I think they are some type of mysid. If any one has had any experience I would like to hear about it.
 
Please explain more about the "micro shrimp" and where you got them. Small saltwater foods are always of interest. Are these copepods or some other creature?
 
They are not copepods or amphipods or any other pod of any kind that I know. They really look like miniature shrimp, I have seen them in many folks refugiums and sumps and no one has been able to tell me what they are. I got them from the live rock bat at the fish store my brother manages. I sat there with a pipette or a few hours and collected 20 or so and now they have multiplied and are by the 100's. Here are a few pics I managed to take today, they never stay put so it's almost impossible to take pics of them. I'll take a vid when I feed Pulpo, they allways come out then.
 

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Cuttle keepers have a miserable time raising mysis (and I have had poor luck on several occassions) but some people report having them in sumps and your experience is exceptional. In addition Steve (Australia) has mentioned that theirs don't eat each other. I am wondering if there are different kinds. Do you know the origination of the live rock in the tanks at the LFS? Sourcing easy to grow out tiny shrimp would be a boon to cuttle keepers.
 
The live rock comes form the Salomon Islands, they think the shrimp are some mysid species but no clue which one. So far, they are not cannibalistic and I don't think they go through a planctonic larval stage since they reproduced in my tank, which is as low tech as it gets. I will talk to Matt Carberry about breeding them, since it was his store (The Coral Reef, Knoxville TN) that they came out of. Perhaps we can figure some way to breed them in large numbers, I can see several females with eggs.
 

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