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Feeding the Octopus.

Davinci

Cuttlefish
Registered
Joined
Aug 18, 2010
Messages
18
Hi Guys I need some help.

Recently I bought an octo and some member identified it as being a Mercatoris. My problem is that this octopus is nocturnal and so far it has been making a living out of my cleanup crew. I never see this octo unless its night time and just for a few minutes, so hand feeding it will be impossible.

My question is what can I feed my octopus other then clean up crew since it is getting expensive? There are not many bait shops around. Is there something I can get the grocery shop?

Thank you.
 
See if you can find a market that sells live crabs (seasonal - usually Asian markets will have them in season) and pick through the live one to find loose legs. You can freeze them and we have found that all our octos love them. A merc won't likely eat a whole section so you might want to cut them up but there is no need to remove the shell (except from the tank).

The other almost 100% food is live fiddlers that most of us mail order from Paul Sachs. We have also had them take freshly killed shore shrimp (the shrimp are generally too fast to provide regular food left live in the tank).

If you dangle food on a string or stick near its den, mercs will learn to take food from you. The trick is finding the den :biggrin2:
 
Firstly, I don't have any applicable experience, yet. I've noticed a lot of cleanup crew animals, for example blue hermits, are quite small. A fiddler is much larger; I think it'd still be more cost effective, despite being higher cost per each. However, not witnessing the octopus eat can be a problem as fiddlers (apparently) can't survive too long in full strength seawater and will bury themselves and die under your substrate. Most people apparently use a plastic tub or jar to put the fiddlers in to keep an eye on them. You'll probably want a holding tank for them and they seem to fairly easy to keep.

Also take note the aforementioned shore shrimp are also shipped from the same supplier (which are cheaper/ea). I would imagine that cheapest/lb. would still be the asian market option though. (Again no experience.)

Anyway, for what it's worth.
 
Davinci;182067 said:
OKay I see. But the price of those fiddlers are more than to just buy extra cleanup crew.

That's the cost of owning an Octopus. (which is still much cheaper then feeding dwarf cuttlefish i might add).

You can also try things like shrimp on fishing line and just leave it dangling under flow, but some live food is likely required. If you order 100 crabs and feed 1 every other day or every 3 days they will last a while. They are easy to keep alive.
 

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