[Cuttlefish]: Ramses

[Hajar]

Notice the sulky black eyes once he realizes he's lost it.

 

[Hajar]

Nothing special, just Ramses and the anemone.

 

[cuttlegirl]

I love the mottled look of his back.

 

[zeekat]

That surfing area seems very appealing, yesterday I had to go out in 5°C.

Do you have plans to ad more cuttles to you tanks and see if it would be possible to breed them?

 

[Hajar]

You'd have to spend a night in the desert or go up into the mountains in winter to find a temperature as low as that around here. Down here on the coast it sometimes drops below 20 degrees C over winter (I remember a 17 degrees C last year). Masirah is a beautiful place - last time we camped there we had a long stretch of beach entirely to ourselves on the SW coast. The surfing beaches are on the E coast facing the Indian Ocean.

I don't think we'll add more cuttles (I'd need a bigger tank) and we're thinking of releasing Ramses back into the local sea once he's too big for his current space. The plan would be to follow and film him for a while.

 

[zeekat]

you can always find some space to place a bigger tank off course.

 

[DWhatley]

Hajar,
It is not a good idea to plan to release Ramses. Once an animal has been place in an aquarium it is subject to disease that can spread like wild fire in the ocean environment even if the animal it self is not effected. Some of the large flow through aquariums make this a practice but their systems only house local species and are fed by the local body of water. In FL, any confiscated animals are either destroyed or house in aquariums but never returned to the ocean for fear of adding pathogens. Twice the Caribbean has suffered from outside attack (though not through aquarium dumping), one pathogen moved from the Panama canal area in a matter of days, killing over 90% of the long spined urchins (more on this and people working to restore them 30 years later can be found here), the time prior killed the population of Queen Conchs (limited to the FL area in this case where the areas effected by the urchin pathogen were much wider reaching).

 

[Hajar]

Important and dramatic advice D. Noted, thank you.

 

[cuttlegirl]

I'm with D on this issue, but that said, the Monterey Bay Aquarium routinely releases sharks back into the ocean. Jean's public aquarium also releases octopus back into the ocean.

 

[DWhatley]

Jenn,
Both of those are flow through the sea systems where the aquariums keep local animals and use the local seawater for the tanks.

 

[Hajar]

Tiptoe and takeoff.

 

[Hajar]

Ramses regularly takes crabs directly from my hand now.

 

[DWhatley]

It will be interesting to see if he tries to make contact with your hand. Cuttlegirl's trio of bandensis would sit on her hand and allow petting but I don't remember others reporting physical contact. I work with my octos to encourage it and have mixed results (some species seem more prone than others to being interested as well as individual animal personalities). You are hand feeding Ramses vey quickly in the relationship so keep the camera ready!

 

[Hajar]

Here you go D.

Ramses quite often fails to keep a hold of crabs this size when they are free to fight it out.

 

[Hajar]

Here's Ramses doing nothing with bivalve and gastropod molluscan colleagues (they do not look related). The snails thoroughly work over the left-behind fragments of crab. Off-camera to the right a crab is making a brave escape.