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We've got eggs!

The eggs you have are planktinic. If they are like some recent eggs I was contacted about you may have less than two weeks. I go collecting all the time at cape ann. It may be tuff to get enough food the correct size 100-400u . Most of the atlantic plankton are isopods and amphipods way to large for the larvae. You can get copepod blums and crab zoea though this time of year .The young will be planktonic for quite awhile. With doing plankton trawls you will need to keep a eye out for hydroids that will grow and sting your young. Your idea is your best chance. I would skip the potting soil and gather some silty ocean mud or shallow water sand. I would caution about leaving the ocean water out side though, it will cook in hours in this heat. Filtration will be the other challenge. I have been working on a way to rear planktonic young. I have some new ideas but nothing tested just yet. I do have access to vast amounts of rotifers, and all the live phytoplankton I can carry home. There is also a copepod that is the correct size range I have been experimenting with, I have been able grow vast amounts in short time. Crab & shrimp zoea are the real key. Ihave been tossing around a few ideas with a new species I have been working with. Even the New England Aquarium was very excited by my idea for rearing GPO paralarvae. Having the food and quantity at the right time is hardest part.
Timing is everything.
-chris :smile:
 
update

Mom is still watching the eggs. I'm reluctant to bother her too much at this point (Chris relayed a story where disturbing eggs caused premature hatching). Here are a couple of pics which aren't as clear as previous weeks.

penelope.jpg


eggs.jpg


I've exchanged email with a number of people about this in the last week. I've had a couple of experts tell me that it won't be possible to raise the inklings. But we're going to try anyway. We've got a rotifer culture up and going, and are working on copepods. We've constructed rearing chambers for them. We'll be starting a detailed journal as they hatch. I'll try to photodocument everything as well.

-Mark
 
Inklings!

They started hatching this morning! They're larger than I expected, about 1.5-2mm long. Here's one:

mantle60x_pic1.jpg


So far, only a couple hundred have hatched. I expect they'll keep appearing for several days. I'm putting some into rearing chambers which are half-liter sized plastic container floating in the tank. I've cut out much of the bottoms of these containers and glued coffee-filters in on the bottoms. This gives water exchange with the main tank while keeping in both inklings and rotifers. I've also got a gentle air bubbler running in each chamber. I think they're eating the rotifers, though it's hard to tell for sure. Based on a paper by Villanueva, I'll be trying to keep 100-300 prey items per liter of water.

There are more pictures at http://www.actwin.com/jod/octopus_photos/inklings_day1/

I hope to get an online journal going on our site shortly. I'll post a pointer to it here once that is done.

-Mark
 
hi mark,

that is an amazing pic. wow. we have a similar octo ,our post is before yours actually, and shejust finished laying her eggs. seems that you only had a gestation period of 30 days? and are you feeding the lil guys only rotifers or something else as well?
and perhaps you could email me that paper on the food? if it all possible?

we are going to attempt to raise our little guys as well! thank so much!

dominika
 
The paper I found with a lot of helpful information is

Villanueva R. 1995. Experimental rearing and growth of planktonic Octopus vulgaris from hatching to settlement. Canadian Journal of Fish. Aquat. Science. 52 : pp.2639-2650

You can download a PDF from http://www.cephbase.dal.ca/refdb/pdf/6300.pdf

The inklings in the rearing chambers are doing fine. There aren't as many visible now swimming in the main tank. This is odd since there aren't any predators in there other than a few bristle worms.

-Mark
 
more hatchings

Many more eggs hatched today. There's probably a thousand inklings swimming around the tank. Anyone in the Boston area want some? We're only going to keep a couple hundred...

If you're interested in following our efforts to raise them, check out http://www.actwin.com/jod/inklingjournal.html as we update the journal daily. If anything significant happens, I'll post here as well.

-Mark
 
Thanks for giving us access to the journal, and documenting this effort so well. Your photos are also excellent.
Good luck - hope lots of the little guys survive.

Nancy
 
Dear Mark,

Your photos and your inklings are wondrous! My sweetie wants to know what exactly are you using to take pictures of these little darlings. A microscope?

It was also suggested that I relay the cautionary tale of the toad. He says:

"In British schools, they use a creature called Xenopus Laevis (the African clawed toad) to teach reproduction in biology class. The clawed toad is ideal for this, because it absolutely, resolutely, steadfastly refuses to breed in captivity, thus there is no danger of it corrupting young minds.

"Unfortunately, when I was about twelve, I had a biology teacher who had no intention of being thwarted by the toad's natural reticence. By giving the poor creatures some kind of hormone injection, he managed to persuade them to breed.

"In quantity. It turns out that toads lay lots of eggs. And in the sheltered environment of a biology lab fish tank, with no predators, the survival rate must have been better than 50%. Suddenly, he was confronted with a new problem: what, exactly, can you do with three or four hundred tiny toadlets that threaten to turn into large, energetic, demanding adult toads faster than you can say xenopus etcetera?

"The answer is that you give them away, in pairs, to every child in the school. And the children take them home to their parents who say "How nice dear" and stick them in an available fish tank, hoping that by the end of the summer, natural causes will have resolved the problem.

"But the African clawed toad is extraordinarily long-lived. And that is why, twenty-six years later, there is still an African clawed toad, lurking lugubriously in a small fishtank on top of my parents' refrigerator.

"I can picture your friend with the inklings sitting outside his house with a cardboard box and a sign reading 'Young octopuses - free to a good home' written in shaky, desperate magic marker, while behind him a half a hundred adolescent octopuses crawl in and out of the windows and chase the neighborhood cats up trees."

I think we are all more than a little in awe of your achievement.

Melissa
 
Pictures

You asked how I take the pictures. Most of them are taken with a regular digital camera. I use an Olympus C-5050Z, which is a fairly new 5 megapixel camera. From about a foot away on macro mode at highest resolution I get a 2560x1920 image with a field of about 3 inches. The octopus pictures were taken like that and then resized to a lower resolution to share. The closeups of the eggs before they hatched were taken that way and then just the center of the picture was cropped out at full resolution.

The pics of the inklings post-hatching were taken with a digital microscope. I've got a QX3 by Digital Blue. http://playdigitalblue.com/products/qx3/main It's sold as a kid's educational toy. It's a USB computer peripheral, like a webcam, but it's a microscope with 10x, 60x, and 200x magnification. You can get it from Toys-R-Us among other places. The 10x and 60x work pretty well. It's very difficult to focus the 200x lens. I'd love to get a good stereo disecting scope for this, but don't want to drop $1000 on it. The QX3 is under $100. It only comes with windows software, but there's a third-party driver for the Mac which I'm using.

So far we haven't killed any of the inklings. This means that he is swimming in circles in the drop of water on the microscope while I'm trying to snap pictures. I know the right way is to add a drop of alcohol, killing it so that it stays still and I can get pictures. But I haven't been willing to do that yet.
 

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