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Diet for new born cuttles????

Nate Peters

Cuttlefish
Registered
Joined
Oct 7, 2011
Messages
21
hi im looking for info on the diet of baby cuttle fish, im 17 and ive been keeping a salt water tank for around 7 years now, and was looking for a different species to try, i thought that mabey sepia bandenesis would be the perfect canidate, but i want to be sure i can meet this animal's needs before i even think about purchasing a clutch of eggs, i plan on feeding the new borns live baby brine shrimp but im not sure if this would be too small for them to eat or notice. if not then i plan on checking with the LFS to see if they get amphiopods regularly, and if all goes well wean them on to the adult frozen mysis shrimp or frozen krill, and silver sides, i plan on keeping them in a 55G with 3 other fish and a divider to seperate the cuttle and the fish. would this work or is this a recepie for disaster????? i feel i can keep it filtered correctly and water qualitiy under control, do any of you experienced folks see any holes in the plan so far???

Thanks in advance, Nate
 
Brine won't work, it isn't nutritious enough. You need live Mysis shrimp. Amphipods are too hard for the babies to catch, from what I understand.
 
anything other than mysis work? rotifers? or should i bite the bullet and start a shrimp culture? how about copepods? do cuttlefish respond to the feeding stimulus in garlic extract??
 
Nate,
IME, mysis are the best first food. Amphipods are the second, as they can sometimes be too strong for very young hatchlings to hold onto. Copepods are generally too small for hatchling cuttles. Rotifers are way too small. Garlic seems useless.
I have never bothered to do a mysis shrimp culture - too much work and space to get enough to feed reliable. I usually just bite the bullet and pay for live mysis. It is possible to wean the hatchlings onto frozen mysis after a few weeks.
 
Nate,

If you introduce a couple mysis(20 would be a good start) into your tank and you feed regularly enough they will soon multiply and infest the tank. I have both my 46 gallon bow front and my 10 gallon with good cultures of several hundred or so(the 10 gallon obviously has many fewer).

I would estimate that you can get a culture going in a tank in less than a month. If your tank has several snails that eat algae and poop then that is probably all the food your mysis will need.

A warning though: Mysis are extremely difficult to catch. I use a turkey baster and its impossible to get more than a couple in ten minutes of trying.

My suggestion would be to get a 10 gallon cycled with algae growing in it. Add a turbo snail and then a couple mysis and you should be fine. Then you can just put your hatchlings in there. You may still have to buy mysis untill they are large enough to eat shore shrimp. But this method will probably save you $100 or so(the first batch or two of mysis usually have pretty good dieoff before the cuttles can eat them all).
 

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