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sepia officinalis ?'s

Joined
Aug 1, 2007
Messages
77
There are some sepia officinalis for sale at Live Aquaria.com. They are captive bred and they say the temperature they need is 78 degrees F. Because they are captive bred do they need cooler temperatures or because they are captive bred and are used to those temps. will it harm them to put them in cooler water.

ps. I know that nautilus can be kept with certain fish, is it o.k to mix them with sepia officinalis in a large tank.


Thank You
 
They need a really large tank, how big is your tank? Also, they are prone to jetting backwards into the sides of the tank causing "butt burn". A circular or semicircular tank is best for S. officinalis.
 
I would recommend keeping S. officinalis cooler than 78 F. While they can live at that temperature, life span is severely shortened and there are x-factors that may occur as well which could cause problems.

Mixing fish with S. officinalis or mixing Nautilus with S. officinalis??

Greg
 
In the cephalopod special in the tropical fish hobbyist it said that you can keep certain fish like pincone and squirrel fish with nautilus. i don't have the tank yet but i'm planning to get a circular 200 gallon aquarium and adding a protein skimmer and a chiller for it. what i was wondering was if you could mix nautilus with sepia officinalis. is this okay. is the tank a good size. the roundnrss is good right?

thank you
 
cephaloholic;104250 said:
There are some sepia officinalis for sale at Live Aquaria.com. They are captive bred and they say the temperature they need is 78 degrees F. Because they are captive bred do they need cooler temperatures or because they are captive bred and are used to those temps. will it harm them to put them in cooler water.

I couldn't find them available on liveaquaria.com, I just found a link with some information that said they would email you when they were available. Also LiveAquaria said minimum tank size was 70 gallons :shock: - that is too small for an animal that grows over a foot long...
 
I haven't seen any available on there in about 2 years, except for the "Divers Den" section.

Yeah, some of their listed tank requirements seem to be made out for juvenile animals and not full-sized specimens.
 
cephaloholic;104327 said:
In the cephalopod special in the tropical fish hobbyist it said that you can keep certain fish like pincone and squirrel fish with nautilus. i don't have the tank yet but i'm planning to get a circular 200 gallon aquarium and adding a protein skimmer and a chiller for it. what i was wondering was if you could mix nautilus with sepia officinalis. is this okay. is the tank a good size. the roundnrss is good right?

thank you

just to reduce confusion (and give credit where credit is due) gjbarord and marinebio_guy are the authors of that TFH article you mention...
 
I can't seem to find them either.

To reiterate, S. Officinalis need a large tank and cold water. I would inquire with LA before you go about purchasing a cuttle from them, if they do indeed have them. They could be confused with S. Bandensis, which are tropical and stay small.
 
Having kept both...

officinalis should be kept much cooler than 78. They are very skittish and ink a lot when they are warmer. I still stand by the 200 gal suggestion for them and greatly oversized filters. Ideally a rounded tank would be best to prevent them crashing backwards and hurting themselves (that can happen in a 200gal rectangular tank).

I would think that the online advert for officinalis dates back to when octopets were supplying them.

I would also think that nautilus temperatures would be fine for officinalis... after all they come from parts of the UK where it will rarely get close to 70F. The cooler they are the better as the longer they would live. I would happily keep them in the 50s for part of the year.

Having said that, I wouldn't actually mix the 2... stick to either one or the other and set it up properly for that type of animal

cheers
 

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