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Depends on age I would think. They will prolly be fine for anything but hatchlings. When I feed local crabs I remove the claws.
 
For a group of 6-8 cuttles, it cost me about 35-40 dollars a week in mysids, then for one month olds, I paid 70 dollars for shore shrimp that lasted 2 weeks. At 1 months old, shore shrimp are so large for them that they wouldn't eat more then 1 a day. So for the first 1.5-2months, it was costing an average of 35$ a week for food.

At 2-2.5 months, I was able to get them to start eating frozen. I will need to look for a good frozen shrimp to try for I have only been trying frozen shore shrimp, which were the ones that died in my shrimp tank.

I haven't fed local caught crabs in a while just because I don't trust them. Especially since the recent oil spill in our bay. Plus its not as entertaining to watch a cuttle eat a crab compared to shrimp! When catching crabs, it lunges with all its tentacles open. For shrimp and fish, they shoot the feeders out. Even with small crabs, I never saw a cuttle go after one until they were at least a couple months old.
 
IMO, having food delivered to your house is cheaper and more efficient than driving 1-2 hours.

For hatchling bandensis, I know of no one successfully weaning them onto dead food. Somewhere between a month and two months is becomes doable. Until then, you need to give them live food, and that costs money because there is currently no cheap, 'proper' live feeds for saltwater animals (live brine is cheap, but a terrible food source). Currently, for the first week or two I bite the money bullet and buy live mysids - 500 costs me 80 bucks or so delivered. After that, I switch to locally collected amphipods (there are threads and pics in the cuttle care forum - do a search :biggrin2: ). Raising live food is a real pain taking generally 3-4 times the water volume of the animal you are trying to feed. Culturing any animal is an effort in itself. If you want to become an expert in that, and have the resources, time and money to pull it off great. If not, you either need to live close to a source of live food (close because if the food animals you collected die, you need to replace them), and have the time and resources to keep them alive until you feed them. So, raising cuttles from the egg is expensive and time consuming. Sadly, that's just the way it is.

Before I found an efficient way to collect amphipods, I collected tiny crabs. Tiny. Like 5 mm or less. A real pain, and the little cuttles didn't really go for them. Mysids just seem to work best. If you want to try any other live food, it has got to be as small as mysids for the first couple of weeks at least. You should see me sorting amphipods by size for the hatchlings - not all that fun.

Daniel, I would use frozen Krill - which is my plan as well. Sometimes the heads are no longer attached and drawing eyes on them help get the cuttles to hit the feeding stick more readily. There may be another better source for marine feeder shrimp in the next year and I will tell you all about it if it happens.

BTW, to avoid all this for people who want cuttles, if I don't have luck getting babies from my current batch, I am planning to raise and wean WC hatchlings onto dead food for sale and sell them when they are weaned.
 

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