Can you help me id my new octopus please!!!

Joined
Nov 26, 2016
Messages
43
Location
west pam beach, Florida
Can you help me id my new octopus please!!!
today I have received my new octopus from Octopus - Pacific
He is pretty small and adorable. Here are some pics. I don't think he a bimac because he dose not have any rings.
 

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LOL, one @ will send me a text so I will see the call :biggrin2:

I've not kept this suspected species and they have only recently been seen in numbers. Typically warm water dwarf species live about 10 months (I have had a couple of mercs to exceed a year). Size is not a particularly great barometer for gauging age as even siblings will vary considerably.

This article shows O. bocki to be a small egg species so there is no current hope of raising young in a home aquarium. Typically, keeping multiples in a tank results in only one animal surviving but O. mercatoris (Caribbean dwarf) is one of the exceptions (and even then we have seen the best luck when they have been caught living in the same area or are siblings). I am tagging @robyn in hopes that she can add info on O. bocki.

O. mercatoris (often labeled O. joubini) is a large egg species and, in the past, we have had several members successfully raise multiple generations. Here is an excellent journal by gholland and another by me of two of these successes. The original journals have links to the successive generations.
 
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Yes, the common Florida dwarf is O. mercatoris and is a large egg species. There is another (found mostly in the Gulf I think) dwarf native to FL that we don't often see. O. joubini, far less common, is a small egg species.

Note of caution. Blue Heron Bridge is a well known dive/snorkel site and taking anything out will put you out of favor with a lot of people. It is not protected but respected. It is a site I want to visit but will not harvest the wild life there (as badly as I want an O. vulgaris). The two main octos found there are O. vulgaris and O. defilippi. Both are large aquarium suitable. It is unlikely that there are many O. mercatoris out in the sandy part but there may be dwarfs in the rock piles near the bridge. Chelsea Bennice (aka Octo Girl) - TONMOcon VI speaker - is doing her PhD research on octopus sharing habitats (here is her Facebook page with lots of great video). You may have seen some of her OMG (Octopus Monitoring Gadget) cameras in the water.
 
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@John Reichard, Neal and I are hoping to get down that way in the next year and will definitely pm you on TONMO when we make our plans - personal tours are always better than trying to explore by yourself! We have been fortunate to have met up with a number of TONMO people over the years (in addition to our TONMOcons) and try to take pictures and create a mini-tcon post when that happens. I have to confess that our favorite has been meeting up with @haggs in Australia :rainbow:.
 
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When octopuses become senescent (or are about to brood eggs) they stop eating but this would not be my first guess from the photos (usually, but not always, a senescent animal will not color fully). It is possible he/she is eating something in the tank (small amphipods are often eaten). My first suggestion is to remove any live fish (it may be intimidated and afraid to come out), limit the amount of food in tank and offer small food (eye sized if dead, live crabs - not hermits - no bigger than half the mantle).
 
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No Fish! First get those fish out of there. I agree with D. Even though the fish might be small its enough to scare the octo. You have a very young octo "From the pics" which we would really like to see more of. It is not uncommon for an octo to go a couple days with out eating. Personally I would remove most of the live food and try to make a very calm home for him/her. Then you can work on getting the octo to eat once a day.
stay calm. The octo is not going to starve itself. How old is the system? How big is the tank? What are your parameters? How much live rock and how old is the rock?
 
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