squishy- abdopus ???

With your premission I would like to make a copy of your find the octo post in our special thread for just such pictures. This is the best one in a long time :biggrin2: The object is to find the ceph, of course but the answer needs to be posted and linked here.
 
the customers love him! not everyone has a chance to see him. but the ones that do are totally blown away. it seems Squishy is a master of hiding right out in the open. People stare at the tank for a long time trying to find him. then i can walk over and say "look he's right here" and everyone is like "i was looking right there a minute ago" it's so awesome.
i thought he would be a lot more shy. i've read other guys journals and they don't see there octo for weeks after release, and Squishy is crawling on the front glass and eating from my hand right away. i guess i got lucky. i'm looking forward to seeing what he does when he's more comfortable with me.

heres the find the ceph photo answer. feel free to copy these to put them anywhere. i can do more in the future if you would like.
thats his prefered den, and its right in front were everyone can see.(or he can see everyone:sly:)
 

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heres some more pics! let me know if i'm posting too much. i tend to get excited
 

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He looks great! Looks like he's pretty active through the day already. Find the octopus is a great where's Waldo game for people who don't know what they're looking for (and even those that do). I'm sure your customers will remember him!
 
:oops: I found an octopus rock and not Squishy :biggrin2:

This is YOUR (well, yours and Squishy's) journal, post away!

I am looking for a good shot of the blue/purple coloration around the suckers for my TONMOCON hobbiest ID talk and would like permission to use one of your photos (keep trying for me but I can likely use one of these if that is OK :wink:)
 
so i'm not sure if he's eating. at first i had some little red crabs i got from my LFS. on the first day he grabbed one up and ate it right away. on the second day i thought he did the same. then i gave him a day of not eating. then he went MIA. i figured he was hiding, its still a new place. on day 5 we spotted him again and i watched him come out of hiding, grab a snail and take it back to his den. the next day i offered him a crab. he reached up and took it then retreated into the rocks. after a few minutes he lets the crab go and starts walking toward the other side of the tank. then i noticed that his L2 and L3 have been cut of about half way down. i didn't know from what. since then i havent seen him eat anything. i have offered him snails and smaller hermit crabs. i even tried frozen fish meat. he will take things from my feeding stick, but after a few minutes he looses interest and walks away. at one point i noticed one of the little crabs chasing after the octopus in his den. i grabbed some hemostats and did my best to try to pull the crab out. ive had to pull out three crabs that i thought i saw him eat. he took all of them from the feeding stick but he didnt eat them. my only guess is that one of those crabs may have damaged his arms. i got those crabs because they were smaller with smaller claws compared to a fiddler. i figured they were safer since he was so small. i guess not.

but he stills moves around pretty good. he hangs out in the open most the time. i don't know if his behavior is from him settling in or if he's stressed from the loss of arms. he lays up against the corners of the glass a lot curled up in a tight ball. his color is more gray most of the time, but i do have a lot of grey rocks in the tank. he still flashes his colors if someone gets too close and he will make himself look spinny. i have seen him with a hermit crab in his arms but he wasn't eating it.

i hope he's ok and that he is eating something and im just not seeing it.
 
The grey coloration is not good.

With fiddler males, I disable the large claw by breaking the top half of the claw but it seems odd that the crabs could attack and harm him.

You can try offering hermits out of the shell. I have had very good success offering these but it is hard to get them out in one piece. I freeze them to kill them and then use a hammer on the shells after thawing. The hermits need to be fairly large to succeed.

You can also try a crawfish tail, another well accepted (but potentially not good enough for regular daily feeding) food I use.
 
so i came to work today and found squishy dead. i feel so bad. on his first days he ws eating and moving good. then he's just been getting worse and worse. i can't help but feel like it's my fault. the water perameteres were spot on. i offered him every kind of food i could get my hands on. and he was taking it on the first day. but something wasn't right. and he didnt survive.

i do not think i will get another octopus. i am in love with these creatures and i feel bad that i am the reason one is dead. i thought i was responsible eneugh to care for one, but apparently not. that fact that i don't know what killed him shows how little i know about these guys. i just feel horrible.
 
Hold on. Maybe you did something wrong (more on that in a minute) but you need to realize that this animal ran a dangerous gauntlet on its way from the ocean to your tank, and along the way was probably exposed to any number of things that might have made it sick, and made it stop eating soon after it arrived. I suspect that many of the facilities that hold animals for sale in the pet trade spread disease like third world brothels. I catch my octopuses myself, so I don't have any direct experience buying them, but I'm never surprised when I hear about one dying "mysteriously" a few days or weeks after arrival. Shipping can stress them beyond the point of no return, not to mention that they can easily be at the end of their natural life span when they arrive. We've speculated that maybe females who have recently brooded eggs, or senile males, are more easily caught, resulting in a loss of apetite and death a few weeks after arrival in a higher percentage of the animals we buy than would be expected. It isn't logical, or fair, to assume that it is your fault that your octopus is dead. "D" is maybe one of the most careful and experienced octopus keepers on Tonmo, and she recently had two octopuses die on her three weeks after arrival. It makes sense to wonder what you MIGHT have done to cause this, and to correct anything that you suspect as the cause, but we both know that you did very careful research and preparation, and I think that a mistake on your part is the least likely cause of death (20% chance? (WAG))

You probably didn't do anything wrong, and I know you did a lot of things right, but even if it were your fault somehow, I think you would deserve to be forgiven. There's an inherant risk in doing anything difficult for the first time. If you avoided taking any chances, you would deserve blame for missing out on life because of fear. If you had jumped into this rashly, without sufficient study, preparation, and care, then you would deserve blame for taking unnecessary risks. But you did your homework, took it slow and listened to the experienced people. In the unlikely event that you did something wrong, it wasn't because you were rash or stupid, and so it shouldn't be held against you. For a guy getting his first octopus, you did everything right. Any mistake you may have made, after all of your careful research, could not have been a mistake you could reasonably expect to have avoided. A smart and careful rookie should not feel ashamed if they make a rookie mistake that only a more experienced person could have avoided.

Don't feel guilty, just try to discover what you might have done wrong (probably nothing), correct any possible mistakes, and try again.
 
ok so i was pretty upset when i wrote my last post. but i've had a chance to calm down and think about things. i do understand that these guys go through a lot before they get to my door. and there is a very real chance that i did nothing wrong. espesially since one of the other members here just ordered an octo from the same source and theres died within a few days. so maybe i got one that was already sick? maybe the shipping caused it to get sick? maybe i got an old male of a dwarf species and he was dying anyway?

but there IS a chance i did something wrong or i could do something better. so i want to figure out what, and try to make some improvements to my tank, and maybe??? think about trying again.
 
Maybe you could start a thread dedicated to looking into what may have killed Squishy. You should probably present all the symptoms, and other pertinent facts, and see if any Tonmo Members can suggest things that you may not have considered yet. You probably won't be able to definitively determine a cause of death, but you might end up with some ideas of changes you can make just to reduce the chances of a mistake on your part. Don't assume that anyone reading that thread has read this one, and try to keep it concise but complete.
 

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