[Octopus]: Baby Bimac - ("Raccoon")

ACC4

Blue Ring
Registered
Joined
Sep 30, 2021
Messages
43
Location
Virginia
I am proud to announce the arrival of baby Bimac!!(needs a name! Suggestions?!)

Baby Bimac has been with me about 5 days now. I am happy to report he is eating and exploring!

I am less pleased to inform that his first real interaction with me was when he flipped out onto the carpet from the acclimation bucket I’d had him in and I raced over and grabbed him and tossed him back in and sat there in shock! Makes me sad his first interaction with me was a life/death frightening event!

The tank has been at:
Temp: 69.1; 71.2; 70.9; 70.4
salinity: 1.026; 1,026; 1.026
Nitrates: 0; 0; 0-2; 0-2

The baby has been watching me. When I tong feed or hand feed he/she pulls me and/or the tongs with great intensity while blowing streams of water at me, but not letting go… lol. Now he just waits pretending not to see the food until I’ve dropped it.
Food has been, lots of fiddler crabs, live clams, on the half-shell frozen clams, seems like a few snails as well.
He/She has excellent coloring of the skin/pigmentation and is very good at hiding/blending in!

Interesting side note- the octopus has been hiding from me, blowing jets at me, trying to move or bite my hand something idk but I’m not getting a friendly vibe -it’s more a fearful ‘get the f away from me!’ vibe. And despite all that, he/she are choosing to slumber (and I witnessed rem sleep!! Oo it was interesting!) slumber in the most open and visible caves where she can watch me, but at the expense of perceived safety-
 

Attachments

  • 525AD4C9-7753-4208-890A-22E6A9D44C0C.jpeg
    525AD4C9-7753-4208-890A-22E6A9D44C0C.jpeg
    1.5 MB · Views: 77
  • IMG_4459.MOV
    3.7 MB
  • 58B9497E-7175-44F6-B873-AF7E6FEA0A2E.jpeg
    58B9497E-7175-44F6-B873-AF7E6FEA0A2E.jpeg
    2.5 MB · Views: 74
Hahah! Flippy !! I like it! It isn’t in my “animal names” theme, but maybe I don’t always have to name my animal companions after other animal species… Other suggestions I’ve gotten are :
Fox—(from three people who have heard about he/r personality!), bull, kitty, kitten, snake
and also non animal: noodle & “EL E”
Here’s a short clip from this morning, this little octopus is so messy I’ve been needing to clean inside the aquarium almost every day (remove uneaten food, gunk that has built up in the water Re circulation fan (the baby proof netting I put over top of it to keep octo from poking curious arms in and getting hurt (which of course when I pulled the protective netting off this evening to rinse s/he instantly shot our two arms at it and pulled them back quite quickly 😣 it may think that that is my siphon blowing at it?! I don’t know, it moves around because it has a magnet.. anyway
This evening:
Salinity- 1.026
Nitrates- 0-2
Temp-69.7
Still has incredible coloring and patterns and creeps around from one rock cave to the next changing designs. It’s also interesting to me to see how much shorter the bimacs arms are in comparison to their body vs. The Korean long armed Octopuses I’ve always had previously.
FAD99509-3884-403C-A1DB-2F616F5215CA.jpeg
 
Journal post:
So baby's name is Raccoon! my little trash panda, very fitting :tearsofjoy:
Omgggg, I'm SOOOO IN LOVE with her (i can't see a hectocotylus-but might be too small or young still)
so okay tank conditions that ive written down over the past like two weeks intending to post but not managing.
salinity readings have been: 1.025 and 1.026 whenever I check- I thought 1.025 was the ideal, but help me out guys- IS that actually the ideal salinity for a bimac??
ph: 8.2, 8.3
nitrates: 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
temp: has varied some, 68.4-70.8
So Raccoon, what a character! she'd first consistently be yanking the feeding tongs or my fingers right along with the prey, usually fiddler crabs as they are her favorite, though she does get super excited about crawfish- it makes me a bit anxious that they are freshwater, somehow i got the idea in my head that feeding her freshwater creatures could make her sick,.,.. I read it somewhere but who knows if it was a reliable site- it was nearly a year ago i'd read it. she really loves the brackish fiddlers, she hadn't eaten any of the more than a dozen hermit crabs i'd had living in this tank for months now, though it seems like in the last week she has wiped them out (i had 6 fiddlers die in a holding bucket that week so she went many days without being fed-maybe why she hunted off all of hermit crabs. so in the last couple weeks she's eaten the snails that hide beneath the sand (forget their name, they have those adorable long hose/trunk looking things that they leave resting just above the sand bed) there were maybe three large ones, about 5 clams that were also buried in the sand, like 8 other snails, probably 8 crabs, 3 crawfish.. really large appetite- not sure how to tell if im feeding her enough. and several clams on the half shell but they were just so stinky that i couldn't continue with those. she has eaten exactly 0 dead/frozen foods... no interest whatsoever. she only ate one or two of the clams on the half shell and left the other few out in the tank to rot and i had to fish them out. there are two peppermint shrimp that i now am feeling awful for because they are fearing for their lives at the very top of the tank at the overflow pipes, and they have turned pale now, but they are too fast for me to catch with a net to at least move them to the sump to live or something.. but Raccoon hasnt been able to catch them either. i grew attached to them as they've lived in the tank for more than 6 months now and they recognize my face vs my son's face. but i digress..
Raccoon has taught me to play a version of hide and seek with her!!!! this started last night, we played it for more than an hour and a half. it goes like this, i spot her hiding spot and tap the glass on the place i see her then place my hand in the water and she grabs onto my fingers, then i remove my hand and i go hide from her (move to a different side of the aquarium, it has 5 sides to it/5 different panes of glass, so i move to a different side and either pull my hair down, or pull a different shirt on, take on or off my glasses etc then wait for her to come find me, she does this by suctioning onto the place directly where i am and waiting for me to place my hand back in then she starts moving away for me to chase her, while she "pounces" onto rocks and shifts her color to camouflage herself (she's getting really good at this!!! she gets better at it through me showing her uhh hey babe, i def still see you there.. lol. so anyway she'll hide again and have me come find her and it repeats with my turn! she also goes back and forth back and forth playing tag with me! so these are all recent developments! then tonight is the first time my son has actually met her!! so he placed his hand in and started playing with her, their game was pretty similar with the tag, although he started following her too fast and she'd also blow a few jets of water at him and was boxing with his fingers-which i couldn't tell at first if those were Raccoon telling him to slow down or back off, until when she went into a crack in the rocks and went a pale color and stopped moving she was clearly saying "hey im overwhelmed, stop" so he took his hand out and retreated back about four feet to my bed and we just let her watch him and i, (im curious to know if she can tell that im his mama by having now touched both of our hands?) anyway after a bit less than 5 minutes of watching him interact with me from her spot in the crack she brightened her colors again, came out and to the front top of the glass where she goes when she's begging me to put my hand in and play so then he came back over and put his hand in and they played some more. really interesting thing about her is her bimac spots-whenever she's really excited they flash bright blue down to pale in a rhythm. Okay, im going to switch to my phone now to post some pics and videos :smile:
 
She’s a baby “teething” on my hand 😂 this was definitely her being playful, her first time actually biting me, these little nibbles, but she didn’t inject any venom and she didn’t actually break the skin at all though there were red marks. It was great lol
 
Okay here I’m suctioning out some water for a partial water change and totally unexpectedly she did a sneak attack and grabbed me!! I had no idea she was even out nor that she had been watching me, but the nanny cam on her tank caught this and I love it lol this was at least a week ago
 
Great updates!!! Raccoon sounds amazing, and like she’s really settled in nicely. So cool that your son got some contact time- my daughters loved being raised with octopuses.

I’ve only been bitten by an octopus once, it wasn’t bad at all, but I did put antibiotic ointment on it just to keep from getting infected.

Keep up the posts!!!
 

Shop Amazon

Shop Amazon
Shop Amazon; support TONMO!
Shop Amazon
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon and affiliated sites.
Back
Top