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Complete newbie requesting help with first octopus setup!

Hmm Lock the door and say your outta town... or tell them its a friends aquarium and your just watching it for the weekend....


Glazier is the correct term. The "Glazier" works at the "Glass shop"
 
It's highly unlikely anyone reported it to the owner, this just isn't that kind of place - we tend to mind our own business as long as nobody's in distress or doing something overtly dangerous. He is probably coming because there's been a dispute about the contract lately, mine is up for renewal and I wasn't happy with the near 20% price hike so I didn't sign it yet. Much longer story but that is the gist of it.

Unfortunately I'm having a bad day and have absolutely no energy to do anything right now, since I got back from the glass shop I have pretty much just fed the fish and slept; I talked with my neighbour, I will lock the door for sure.
 
Oh well, I locked the door and my neighbour just told him I was sick, they talked and he went away. Hopefully I can get the contract dealt with before he decides to return.
 
New glass is arriving today and I'm looking forward to sorting it out.

About the anemone then: it is totally uninterested in food, no feeding response. I've tried to give it pieces of raw shrimp on a feeding stick, and I also poked its tentacles very gently with the stick on its own to see if it responded, but it doesn't make any attempt to grab anything at all, the tentacles just sway in the water. Is this normal? Suggestions?
 
Most anemone's are photosynthetic, they house algae that feeds them, and is why lighting is important. Most will eat and need a small amount of meaty food but only some will actively show meat eating (my Caribbean flowers and curlyque are very active at feeding time but my bubble tip is not). The shrimp is likely much larger than the tiny food it is accustomed to catching on its tentacles
 
Hmm ok... I was just going off what the guy in the shop told me to do. He said to feed it meat once a week or once a month depending how fast I wanted it to grow, and that the tentacles should grab the feeding stick.

It is being lit 12 hours a day - should I feed it anything then?
 
Yes, it will need some additional meaty food but it may not consume chunks of meat or it may have been fed recently. We feed ours much smaller food but they eat daily.
 
Shrimp is meaty but I have found the octo hatchlings have problems eating it and I think it is tough, finely ground might work. Ours thrive on tiny meaty food, ground up or tiny mysid (frozen), Cyclop-eeze(tiny, tiny shrimp type animals), any zooplankton (available here in liquid form as well as the dried that I don't feed but many do).
 
Ok I have zooplankton from the previous owner for the corals - just slightly confused how it will actually eat it since at least the other fish flake food just swirls around according to the water flow.
 
If you touch (very gently) a tentacle, you will likely notice a sticky feel. Some are more obvious than others and some will sting the stink out of you, I have a marvelous creature (supposed to be some form of antler anemone but it is different than others I have had and absolutely wonderful) that I was stupid enough to think would leave me alone trying to get some algae off the glass earlier this week (dumb, dumb dumb - need to make a ceph with a dunce cap smiley). This one is particularly aggressive during the lights on time (shrinks to 1/10 size at night) and will sway toward any movement (including counter current). The tentacles pick up tiny bits in the water and feed the mouth. I have curleyque that is large and aggressive but does not sting. She (Medusa) will wrap her delicate tentacles around much larger (still not large) food and we see her feed. The flower anemones are different again. The flowers will take the largest food items of all my anemones and have the most apparent mouths and most apparent eating behavior. They are VERY sticky (feel almost like sticky sandpaper) and collect the floating foods then fold up on themselves to move the food to their mouths and keep it from escaping.

The two bubbles that Linda sent me show no apparent feeding and I make sure to target them with tiny food. They are growing and one is starting to show bubbles but the heat has has an impact so their color (they have "bleached" and given up some of their algae) is not as it should be for a healthy animal.

If you are successful with a hosting of clown and anemone, the anemone will eat the tiny scraps that escape the clown. Some of this will be in the form of almost a liquid. It occurs to me that you might try squirting some of the thawing water (use saltwater when you thaw, tank water is fine but I usually keep a container of new mix for this as a convenience) over the anemone to see if it wants something smaller than what you are feeding.
 
I tried to touch it a couple of days ago gently, I was surprised it didn't sting me when I originally took it out of the bag as I had been warned that it might. The tentacles didn't feel sticky at all, they were almost imperceptible. I have seen it sitting there sometimes with its mouth gaping wide open and big, and at other times there is no hole at all and it looks like a regular plant.

But I think you have just highlighted a classic newbie mistake... thawing water... when I have thawed the shrimps I just put them in an empty bowl, waited for them to thaw, peeled them and then tried to feed them. Nobody told me I was supposed to thaw them out in water... doh :P I will try that :smile:
 
George loved the shrimp thawed in saltwater! I cut off literally 5-10% and watched him eat it, he ate two pieces altogether. The anemone showed no interest. It hasn't lost any colour - I have had the lights on 12 hours per day - and it stays mostly still but moves around occasionally, it seems to have two favourite places, or it can't decide hehe. Oh well... I will keep trying each day, I thought they were supposed to be always hungry.
 
Tank repair complete. I will just lay it out here from inside to outside to be sure:

1. Nut
2. White plastic washer (hard surface)
3. Overflow box wall
4. Tank glass
5. 60mm gaskets (I haven't cut them about for fear of messing them up, they are amazingly hard to obtain on their own)
6. New acrylic place (6mm thick, 45mm holes, it is a perfect match to the overflow box)
7. Original (smaller) bulkhead gaskets - but smaller than the diameter of the flange which I believe is what is desired
8. Background print with holes large enough for the flange to go entirely through
9. Flange
10. Pipework

I have to say I didn't centerise the 60mm gaskets particularly well, it was hard to see with all the stuff, and I haven't used any silicone at all (yet). Nonetheless, although I see drips coming down between the overflow box and inside tank wall, which I frankly don't care about at all, the outside is 100% dry with no leaks, which is surprising considering that there is only 1.5mm - 2mm leeway when the 60mm gaskets are perfectly centerised.

I have tightened the bulkheads only as tight as they will go with my hand at this point (I'm very weak, even for my size, due to health).

The overflow box is perfectly level.

So... have I done it correctly? Any changes I should make. I've turned the RO filter back on now so I can finish filling the tank.
 

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