Finally, an octopus in Holland

Lovely pictures and interesting environment for your octopus.
My cuttlefish ate live shrimp, but some octopus find them difficult to catch? It is important to find something for your octopus to start eating, you can try to change to something more convenient or cheaper later?
You mentioned it was caught in the shop using calamari as bait- would it eat that?
You can see the health and enthusiasm for life of your pet once it starts feeding.
 
Will it be able to make it to the weekend without crabs? When added to the tank, it should eat fast because these crabs come from the nordsea (very chikky now), so probably doný stay alife very long in the warm aquarium (24 celsius).

I have canon ixus 400, it's truly a fabulous camera. Especially the macro mode.

Any indication how long it will life? a few months? half a year? a year?
 
If i was to be really negative i could say that its not feeding because it is a mature adult looking for a place to spawn... it has happened before to people on the site. Hopefully, this is not the case here!!! :smile: But it may be a fertilsed adult or a male that has mated??? Worst case scenario is that it lost its arms being torn away from its den where it had eggs?

The longest I have kept one of these octopuses is around 6 weeks or so, not much longer.

You could bring the crabs slowly to room temperature, say overnight and then raise their temp to tank temp after that?

This is one of the most annoying and frustrating things about keeping cephalopods. At least in the USA it is really easy to buy captive bred bimacs. Over here I have ordered 'vulgaris' on at least a dozen ocassions and opened a box to find cf. aculeatus or bocki or even species that i have no idea what they were????

My first octopus was an adult long-arm species like horridus but it never stopped me!!!

If i had the space I would be breeding bimacs, Sepia, Rossia and Eledone or at the very least.. rearing eggs!!!!
 
Even if it is an older octopus, you're giving it a good home and you can learn a lot about octopuses by watching and interacting. It's a very handsome octopus. Does it have a name yet?

Nancy
 
mussels and oysters life in the tank. The molly for 1 night, haven't seen it afterwards, but don't think to octo got it. I had a molly in there before but they seem to have problems with the night (to many critters around).
The peeled shrimp was in there for one night, afterwhich I removed it.
The crabs have been in the tank since yesterday.

Why is it a problem?
 
I mean the problem with it not eating...

it could be that there is plenty amphipods in your tank which it is feeding on? I had an O. bocki that seemed to refuse all for ages, but was eating amphipods etc
 
Hi Colin,

I do see skins of these amphipods flooting around once in a while, so they are in the tank, but I don't know how many, since I haven't seen any alife. Do you think I should worry about it not eating, although I have food available?
 
well, its not perfect.

id like to see an octopus eat every second day but its hard to tell what yours may or may not be eating.

I have in the past tied a live crab to fishing line (not easy :smile: ) and left it near the front all night and see if it gets eaten or try a piece of shrimp on a line and dangle it near the octopus as if its alive
 
aculeatus food

Any luck yet? Aculeatus in the wild tend to break crabs/shrimps/stomatopods apart a bit when they feed, so chances are the amphipod exoskeletons in the tank are molts rather than table-scraps. It's possible it did eat the fish if you haven't seen it around the tank lately. Sometimes when they eat minnows or gobies they don't leave anything behind. Worth another try. The best luck I've had is with live crabs (de-clawed if the octo is old or seems tired/losing coordination). Was the shrimp you gave it still cold? If it still has a desire to feed, by now it should be pretty hungry, so it might be worth trying again with a small (about 1 cm cube) piece of thawed shrimp (shell on) if you don't have crabs or more fish. Pierce it on a small piece of wire on a small stick (so the octo can pull it off) and gently touch the suckers with the shrimp so the octo can taste it. If it pushes it away after all this time not feeding, chances are it's really not hungry.
 

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