• Looking to buy a cephalopod? Check out Tomh's Cephs Forum, and this post in particular shares important info about our policies as it relates to responsible ceph-keeping.

Will he live

How do you change to RO water? I filled my tank up before I decided on an octopus...:frown:

I know that seahorses are very sensitive to copper, and I keep them in tap water (which is dechlorinated, and the bottle says it removes heavy metals). Now I feel bad...I might have just ruined a tank...does anyone know the minimum amount that can bring harm to an octopus? I have a test kit that goes to around 0.1 I think.
 
Maybe do a 20-25%, wait a bit, and do it again...
Maybe you don't have a lot of copper in your water - do you get a city water report?

Nancy
 
Copper often comes from copper pipes, either in the water supply or in our house. Inverts would also be an indication of whether your water was safe - but we don't know whether an octo is more sensitive.

Nancy
 
There's little that's more frustrating than trying to troubleshoot the cause of death of a cephalopod. As just about everyone else has pointed out, the non-RO water is your most obvious smoking gun, but RO water isn't always the solution.

What exactly killed him? You'll never know. People are quick to scream copper because it's the Big No No in cephalpods, but there's zillions of things that can kill your octopus. Science only knows a couple hundred of them. I don't think it was copper, and I don't think you've ruined your tank.

I have had success in troubleshooting problem tanks by adding a "metal sponge" or something like it to a chamber in the canister filter. Let it run for a week and work up the nerve to try it again. You might want to try some cheap invertebrates before another ceph, though.

To convert to Reverse Osmosis water, you will obviously need to buy an RO unit and install it. If you have basic plumbing skills, you can hook it up yourself. After that you can choose to replace all the water in your tank at once or phase it in. Replacing all at once is a pain but it gives you much more peace of mind. Be sure to age your tank at least a few weeks before adding anything delicate, and the longer you age it, the better.

Good Luck! CephJedi
 
cephjedi said:
You might want to try some cheap invertebrates before another ceph, though.

If someone finds a cheap, dumb invert that's even more sensitive to copper than a ceph, documenting that "canary in a coal mine" would be *really* useful...

When I kept sea horses back in the late 70s, I had never heard of RO water; I think I just let tap water sit around a few days for the chlorine to outgas. Of course, that was also before commer plumbing was common in houses... but I can say that sometimes tap water is safe for seahorses... not that I recommend it, now that I know better, but from my seahorse experience (being a naive 5th grader), either they're not as hard to keep as everyone seems to say, or I really, really lucked out.
 
I suspect that the ease of seahorse keeping also depends a bit on species.... some will be harder to keep that others. Also there is a major difference in keeping wild caught and farmed! In NZ the only species readily available is the Southern Potbelly (or Big Bellied....whatever! :biggrin2:) Hippocampus abdominalis Which is a giant species reaching 35cm length, they are only just starting to be farmed in NZ but they need a very tall tank as adults (at least 80cm - 1m) and they are very suseptable to disease and sensituve to fiarly minute water quality changes. Wild caught ones will only eat live plankton but the farmed ones will take frozen. But they pick up diseases for no aparent reason (eg Bubble disease!).

J
 
Jean said:
I suspect that the ease of seahorse keeping also depends a bit on species.... some will be harder to keep that others. Also there is a major difference in keeping wild caught and farmed! In NZ the only species readily available is the Southern Potbelly (or Big Bellied....whatever! :biggrin2:) Hippocampus abdominalis Which is a giant species reaching 35cm length, they are only just starting to be farmed in NZ but they need a very tall tank as adults (at least 80cm - 1m) and they are very suseptable to disease and sensituve to fiarly minute water quality changes. Wild caught ones will only eat live plankton but the farmed ones will take frozen. But they pick up diseases for no aparent reason (eg Bubble disease!).

J

Yeah, when I did lose the seahorses, it looked like it was some sort of fungal infection that got them...

From my "Encyclopedia of Sea Horses" it looked like I had Hippocampus Hudsonus, but I really didn't know the details of species ID at the time...
 
Brock Fluharty said:
Hmm...i've never heard of that species being kept in aquaria.

Tis the only species we have (at the moment, some of the zooprofs are attempting some DNA work to try to resolve the speciation of these guys !)

Brock they're not commonly available yet, and they do seem the be sensitive. I've seen them for sale in a local pet store, which is also a vet clinic and cringe every time I've seen them. They're usually in a VERY small tank with copious bubbles & when I've asked about their feeding regime I get "oh you know a sprinkle of flake twice a day!!!!" :mad: That usually sets me off on a rant.....!! Other than the horses the sale tanks are beautifully clean and the stock is in great condition, they seem to have a blind spot about horses tho!.......Happily they DON'T sell cephs!!!

J
 

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