Does this sound right to you?

Hi Dan,

Welcome to TONMO.com! :welcome:

Thanks for clarifying how you're catching and selling these octopuses.
We have a lot of people on this site who are not only interested in octopuses, but are also very fond of them and want to make sure they're treated well.

Actually, people do pay $50 all the time to ship one octopus! Maybe you also have small crabs people could order at the same time to make the shipment more cost-effective.

Do you have a website or do you sell wholly on EBay?

Nancy
 
Nancy
I do send crabs and snails for the octopi to eat in all my auctions.
I do most of my selling on the phone, at ebay and to local shops. If anybody wants one they can send me a private message.
Thanks!!
Dan
 
:welcome: Dan i am glad to see you have registered here i guess we did kinda of attack you.I would like to say sorry for that like Nancy said people will pay $50 for shipping for one octo i just paid $100 to get one bimac from marinebio_guy becuse of his reputation here.I always see post for people looking for pygmy's on here so this is a good place to be:wink:.When i saw Octopus vulgaris in your post thats what upset me under the tank conditions you had listed is why i got worked up but now that we know they are more then likley dealing with a dwarf species makes more sense.Maybe when you get your camera back up you can post some pics for a good ID here.I think everyine is leaning towards O. mercatoris if collected from Florida.We just want is best for the animal.Glad to have you here and hope you except my apology.

Thanks Dutch
 
Hi gang, (Thanks Nancy for flagging this one up :wink: )

I'm not going to get into the rights and wrongs of selling cephalopods on eBay. eBay rules clearly state the animal species which can be sold on its site and octopuses do not come under the acceptable 'items' list. It's in black and white. They shouldn't be sold on eBay and that's an issue for them to look into. More on that later.

I use eBay a lot. And I have bought many species of live fish via some very good sellers and I have also sold many juvenile species in return. My take on it is this...

It has made many species of fish and items of equipment available to people who otherwise might not have the chance to keep them. I have managed to get my hands on some 'rare in the trade' killifish for example and the Corydoras nijsseni I have been selling are also pretty rare to find. All in all I have to say that eBay has been a good thing for me. Some people may have had negative experiences. (I did lose money on a pair of leopoldi stingrays I bought which the seller didn’t actually have but PayPal got back 90% of it back for me)

If eBay change their rules and accept octopuses as 'legal' then I don’t mind. As Roy points out, the liverock they are coming out from is farmed rock, not natural. The octopuses are just a byproduct of a good man-made environment and essentially farmed too. Fair enough I say.

It’s not comparable to selling ‘zebra’ octopuses or even, and think about this one for a minute… all the octopuses that are wild caught in nets all over the world and sold as food for human consumption. I buy them, and squid, to feed to my large carnivorous fish species… and me from time to time!!!

I make money from animals and don’t have an issue with anyone else doing that either.

Here’s the crux of the matter -

We love our cephalopod pals and don’t like to think of them being mis-sold, misunderstood and mistreated. I think it's great that people are looking out for them and fair play to the people who object to them being sold on eBay (they are in the right in regards to eBay rules) but we shouldn’t slam people before getting all the information.

Dan has kindly joined and said his part and we should respect that, I hope you (Dan) hang about and share with us your octopus knowledge, you are very welcome here.

I don’t think it is responsible selling if you can’t properly ID the animal you are selling and that goes for divers and marine biologists. Not targeting Dan specifically but all the LFS’s in the world too who have even sold me blue rings marked as vulgaris etc! There is a (literally) huge difference between 3 mercatoris and 3 vulgaris (several lbs worth I would guess LOL) that would be like me selling a fish as ‘catfish’. It might grow to 2cm or 2 m long??? I think the advert should be more specific about species.

Sorry if this next bit is boring to all the original TONMO.com members but here it is again for the new people, many of whom I have never had the chance to converse with...

Keeping cephalopods as pets is not altogether a new idea but it’s STILL in its infancy when compared to other aquatic hobbies. It is correct to say that guidelines needed to be tweaked from time to time and we haven’t always been 100% right, but all in all, very close.

Monty asks about the collective TONMO knowledge and it’s a fair point. Where did all the information originally come from? Well, initially it was James Woods, Roy Caldwell, Chris Shaw, ‘Jimbo CephJedi’ and me that had monopoly on all online information.

At the time that was fine, it was a starting point based upon many years of keeping aquatic organisms, lab work, working in LFS’s, public aquaria and zoos. Most of it was common sense, transferable experience and a little trial and error.

We all know that nothing counts better than experience does and over the years I have kept many species and many more individuals and from that, along with new cephalopod friends that I made, we put together the initial guides for minimum husbandry. Most of it I am confident enough to say that I still agree with, even years later.

But, what works for one person might not work for another. That is the problem.

It might sound hypocritical but my advice to a new potential octopus keeper and how I would actually do it in practice are quite different things. The guidelines set out by our husbandry articles are just that, guidelines. NOT rules set in tablets of stone.

That said, they have proven to be a lifeline for many a captive cephalopod and should be stuck closely too until you have the experience. The rules can be tweaked but you’d do very well not to break them. There’s not much in the articles different to keeping any other large aquatic marine predator in home aquaria.

Could I personally keep a mercatoris in a 3gal tank with no skimmer? Probably yes.

Would I advise a newcomer to the hobby to try it? Absolutely not! It takes a long time to get used to the intricacies of marine animal husbandry.

Would I advise anyone keeping 3 unknown species of octopus in one tank not knowing what species they are? No. that is irresponsible.

Yes, there are shades of grey.

Take the guidelines, read them, learn from them, keep cephalopods that way and then with experience you can take it new places. This isn’t a closed book. Feel free to offer suggestions when you think the guides can be updated. Feel free to write your own articles and send them to us. Feel free to enjoy the hobby and not get bogged down in bickering (young’uns chest beating? lol)

Your mention of ‘things not invented’ here is also a good point but I for one do not have this close-mindedness and welcome all additions to our knowledge database which is TONMO.com. I am however, very wary of false claims and we do seem to get our share of them. We also get more than our fair share of ‘corner cutters’.

I am also very wary of the ‘this is how I do it and my way is the only way’ attitude sometimes seen here. It has caused more that a few online punch ups and certainly not to be encouraged.

I always urge people to do the very best they can for the animals in their husbandry, not the cheapest. Buy the biggest tank and best equipment you can for that particular species. Read everything you can on the subject, get practice at keeping other hardier marine animals first and build up experience.

As I said earlier; it’s still an infancy hobby. But this is a good thing, it means that there is still so much to do and discover. 2 years ago no-one would have thought that bandensis cuttles would be so (relatively) easy to find, keep and encourage to reproduce - what an achievement! In more years to come I bet that home bred octos will be as common. Roll on that day!

Cazz2020, thanks for bringing the thread up. It was very valuable and obviously something that needed to be addressed.

AXIMBIGFAN, I took out the name calling from post #18

Ditto to you Brock, you name caller!

Now please, if you want to respond here please do. All comments are welcome and the thread is not locked. I’ll keep an eye on it and tidy it up or split the thread into a new one later if need be

Best wishes to all
Colin
 
Oooh, I missed a lot on this thread. Didn't know the eBay seller actually joined!

What Colin says here is quite cogent, I always defer to him and Nancy (and a few others here) for last word on ceph keeping.

Just for the record my only point in reporting the eBay product for sale was that I was nervous about the well-being of the octos in question... I'm all for forward advancement, so long as it's done responsibly and in a well-informed manner. Nothing against the seller; obviously the sale was proposed with the best of intentions.
 
Well said Colin-a quick question for you.
How bad did your fingers cramp up after all that?:wink:
I pm'd Dan an apology for all the flak. I hope he sticks around.
Being new here myself I do feel bad that his first experience here wasn't overly friendly.
 
wow, that was insightful. one has to be careful about being too quick to condemn. i really enjoyed this thread. i think the staff's comments were instructive and constructive.but sometimes you have to think outside the box. i've thoroughly enjoyed raising the 100 or so baby bimacs to their current 3 month old stage,and when you see their intelligence,it is amazing. sure you want the best and biggest for them-they're your kids. however,you do your best. With CARE. i didn't think i would be this successful . caging any animal might be deemed cruel. just think about a bird in a cage, or a fish in a tank- can you imagine what that is like?(i guess those of you who have been incarcerated ----) certainly stimulation is key. that is why as part of my studies i try to talk to my octopuses. o.k. not talk. but touch. i handle them, they definitely have temperaments. some seem to like this interaction. one in particular seems to crave it . i'm kinda falling for her- we're thinking of ruuning away and getting married.

not taking life too seriously, zyan ( god i hope she wants kids,lol)
 

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