Yeti - O. briareus

DWhatley

Kraken
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K&P Aquatics came up with this little guy. I forgot to ask Kara how she managed to catch (or see) him/her and suspect he came with something else as by-catch. The little one I was suposed to get that escaped in January also showed up in their tank this week but found a home before I could post availability. Hopefully the new keeper will join us.

No name yet but thinking about Scooter. I am guessing he is about 9 weeks old (expected hatch date March 8, 2012) by going back and looking at Kooah's hatchlings photos and the full moon schedule (Kooah's brood hatched during the May 2010 full moon) . The area around its eyes are still very blue and will change to green in the next few weeks but I don't have a definite observation time of the change.

There is an oddity to one of his arms (either R1 or L1 :oops:). The last 1/3 to 1/2 on one arm tends to stay slightly curled oddly and is frequently peach while the rest is white. He can use it and can make it white but at rest it reverts to slightly curled and peach on just the lower portion. You can see the odd coloration in the video but not the stills. Another arm is mostly missing but I was surprised to see how long the arms appear. I remember noting that they get their arm lengh (proportionately) early but the length still seems impressive for such a little guy.





More than once I had a hard time finding him during acclimation


 

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I put him in a breeder net in his permenant tank but I don't expect he will stay their long. Hopefully he will eat some of the larger pods in there before he ventures out though. The video is even worse than my copy I am afraid. What appears to be a top is a grid to the upper floor of the net where he has several shells and macro algae for hiding. By this evening he found one of the barnacle shells and tucked himself in. I may try to add a piece of LR though only the mercs have used the barnacles long.
 
I ordered live crabs and shrimp from Paul Tuesday night but called him Wed AM to swap the crabs for more shrimp when I saw how tiny he was. Looking back only Cassy and Tatanka lived this long so I think we are past the first two critical stages. The net is not a good sizing perspective as it is twice the size of most breeder nets.

He refused a piece of thawed crab yesterday but appears to have taken the live shrimp I suffed into his (third move) barnacle tonight (at least the shrimp did not come back out and I saw frantic arms poking from the shell :roll:).
 
As expected, this one did not stay in the net long and has been MIA for two days. I am putting all the pods from the filter stocks for all the tanks in here and a supply of shore shrimp (we also feed the tank once a day with cyclop-eeze).

The polyps in this tank, and their offspring in two other tanks have bleached and are not recovering. I have no good idea as to why (possibly high nitrates but it started about the same time in all the effected tanks) and am concerned it is something in our water. The ricoridias in other tanks started looking poorly as well but are now recovering and look robust but the polyps (some 5-7 years in a tank environment some only ~4 years), with the exception of one tank (the younger group and never bleached) do not look like they will recover. After Diego's death (the polyps had already bleached and stopped eating), I let the tank come back to room temperature I have left the chiller attached but set it not to come on until the tank exceeds 80 degrees. I also replace my RO filter and all the associated prefilters and DI sand. The RO was overdue but the other filters were not excessively neglected. Prior to Diego, it had no attached chiller and was home to both Mama Cass and Tatanka (they were switched after mating) but the polyps in the two tanks that were converted to colder tanks seemed to handle the cold without much of a problem, the third tank was never chilled. The one indication that it may have been something in our water was the uneffected tank had not had a water change in a couple of weeks since it had no resident primary animal (only scavengers and a few softies).

With ziggy's passing, I may try to move the little one into the smaller tank (if I can find him :roll:) for a few months to make it easier to be sure he is eating well.
 
No, no name yet. Since we have not seen him, it is hard to come up with a name :roll:

I warned YOU about escape when you got Squid, remember :wink: and this was just a net and not a critter keeper so I expected it would not take long. Since the best success we have seen with hatchlings has been those that have been lose in the tank, I did not try to keep him heavily contained. I kind of wish I had now though since Ziggy's tank is available and the smaller environment would have been easier to manage.

All the shrimp that disappeared that I had hoped he had eaten showed up in the filter sock today. He did not take much interest in eating the live shrimp I put in his dens. He would kill them but not eat much, if any. Hopefully the small shrimps in the LR are sustaining him. I keep adding pods to the tank when I clean out the filters from the other tanks hoping this is the case. He has not eaten the two small hermits that wander about in there.
 
Octopus spotting!!! Yea! We have not known if this little one was still alive since he escaped his net. I turned on our make shift red light two nights ago in hopes of spotting him and FINALLY, I saw him tonight. He does not seem to have grown much but he is active and was quick to slide into the rock when he noticed me. I may decide to call him Phantom or Figment :biggrin2:
 
Octopus Spotting 5 days since last seen. Unless Neal comes up with an alternate, I am going with Yeti for this one.

Tonight I noticed a couple of pieces of shell in a hole in one of the larger rocks that sits directly below the red light so I spent some time looking with (shame on me!) a white flashlight. I spotted little arms in another, connected hole and immediately turned off the light but went back to watch and saw a curious little mantle pop out. He is still TINY. This time he did not disappear so I skewered a shore shrimp and offered it on a stick. I was delighted and surprised that he took it and then sat out side his den to eat it. We don't feed the tanks on Saturday and missed tonight as well (this was Octavia's first real "fasting" Saturday as I usually give in to her pacing and offer her something little. She made it quite clear that she was NOT to miss a feeding Sunday so she did get an extra large crab leg tonight) so he may have been very hungry (I did see pods and live shrimp in the tank) if he is eating the bits of shrimp and Cyclop-eeze we feed the tank. He disappeared a couple of times with his prize but came back out and was obviously still working on the shrimp as it was a big as his little mantle. I am encourage with the interaction but concerned about the lack of growth. Hopefully, I can start feeding him directly now as he has been scrounging on his own since he left the breeder net and was not eating very much while in the net.
 
Successful stick feeding 4 of the last 5 nights and an early arm spotting on the one night he did not come out to eat. Now to get him to come out at 6:00 PM and not 4:00 AM :biggrin2:
 
Neal finally agreed on Yeti. He wanted to call him figment because, until tonight, he had never seen the little guy. He seems to know where to wait for food now and grabs the shore shrimp from the stick very quickly. He disappears after he has his dinner in hand (arm) though. Every time I see him I still can't believe how tiny he is. They look bigger in a breeder net than in a 65 gallon aquarium :biggrin2:
 
Just after lights out (about midnight), Yeti can be found sitting just outside his den. I can turn on a hall light next to the tank, catch and skewer a shrimp :yuck:, go to the front of the tank, climb on a stool, open the top and offer the feeding stick without him disappearing. Unlike our original encounter with food, he does not immediately spring on it but waits to see how close I will bring the food. Ultimately, he grabs it off the stick in one, very, very quick motion (you might call it a flash of arms) and then takes it to his den.

As many as I have kept and raised from quite young I feel a bit silly saying this but Yeti is still tiny and does not seem to be growing at a rate I would expect so I have to wonder about something unusual. I really think it is my impatience to have him large enough to be comfortable he will survive but I honestly don't detect growth. Albeit, I only see him a few minutes each night when he comes to the front of his den and waits to be fed but he is sooo tiny. I have offered a second shrimp that was eventually taken but the interest was not strong and I am not sure he ate it so I don't think he would eat more (he may also be hunting on his own though).
 
Yeti gave me a scare yesterday. Since June 4th he has been taking offered food nightly without fail (not at the same time and sometimes it takes coaxing to get him to show but he has shown up and eaten). Last night was his first no show. I had done my weekly maintenance on the tank earlier in the day and kept telling myself that I had carefully checked the filter sock and was sure he did not get thrown out with the "bath" water but ... Fortunately, he finally showed up in his normal, "waiting for dinner" spot tonight (but not until about 2:30 AM). I gave him one of the larger (but not large) shore shrimp since he did not eat yesterday. It did not take him long to reach for the feeding stick but he did not appear to be starving :wink: (I put all of the "pods" in his tank from the other tanks yesterday so he may have found plenty on his own).
 

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