S Bandensis care and tank setup

[cwaist]

Hi I am thinking of setting up a new tank and was thinking about keeping S Bandensis cuttlefish. I have kept marines for about 5 years now but have only kept reef tanks in the past with all the usual fish like surgeons fish ect. My current 100 gallon reef tank has gone and got a crack in the front pane so I have re homed all the fish and just kept hold of the corals as the tank is still holding water with no leaks but its just a matter of time. I am thinking of setting up a 5'x2'x2' tank as a reef just keeping my softies and polyps ect and get rid of all my lps and sps corals and just wanted a bit of advice on setting the tank up. I am abit unsure of a few thing I am not sure what sort of flow the cuttle fish like? I was thinking something around 25 to 30 times per hour as I only intend to keep softies and polyps. Also how many S Bandensis could I comfortably house in this size tank? I would like to breed the cuttle fish due to the fact that they do not live very long and would like the tank to be self sustaining rather than keep buying new wild collected eggs every year or so and have read quite alot about the raising the eggs but found very little information regarding the actual breeding in the aquarium.

Do they readily breed in the aquarium if all the water perimeters are correct or is it quite rare? Finally it may sound a daft question but as I said I have never kept any kind of cuttlefish before or anything like and was unsure what the cuttle fish are like when your hands are in the tank as I also enjoy fraging my corals on a regular bassis and was not sure if the cuttles was prone to attack your hands like some lion fish ect?

 

[monty]

Start here: Cephalopod Care and with the other ceph care articles under the big ARTICLES tab at the top. Getting the cuttles to breed doesn't seem to be difficult, but getting fertile eggs and raising hatchlings seems to be the sticking point for multi-generational breeding attempts. Hopefully, some of the experienced cuttle-keepers will chime in with more details...

 

[cwaist]

Cheers for the link monty. I was hoping that was the case as I have raised and bred Peppermint shrimp in the past with quite good results so I don't mind the challenge of raising the babies. Also in their a problem with in breeding as I was planning on buying 3 or 4 so chances are I get a male and female and raising the babies to keep around 8 or 9 adults at any one time so obviously they would eventually start to be inbred?
That's was the plan anyway lol.

 

[monty]

Thales is probably the best person to answer that... we've had a number of people raise one or two generations from wild caught eggs, but generally the later generations run into some sort of problem. Whether this is inbreeding, nutrition, or something else is unclear. Cuttlegirl's 3 cuttles produced over a hundred fertile eggs, but as far as I can remember, few of the offspring were successfully bred.