Fletcher - O. Hummelincki

Well he is just sitting on a rock half in a cave looking around. That's really all I have to update on, D how many times per day should he be fed. He is willing to eat snails if I give them to him. Also if anyone was wondering how I came up with the name fletcher, I named him after jim carrey's character fletcher reede in liar liar. I just really liked that movie so I decided it was a suitable name.
 
LOL, you should feed your guy 1/2 his mantle length every day. Well thats what i do.

I named my octopus beans because i watched the movies hot rod the night before i got her. If you seen it then you know when the brothers go cool beans.
 
Feeding is still a very open topic. Roy has (or had) a bimac that lived an astounding 3 years and he feels that keeping them underfed is the key. I am not sold on our vernable professor's diagnosis as the full reason for this amazing longevity though :oops:.

As a bit of a compromise to having a constantly hungry octo but taking Roy's observation into account (as well as a long practiced fasting method used with seahorses) we feed our octos once a day, 6 days a week and fast the entire tank 1 day a week - SueNami will occassional coax a small crab from us on the fast day, it just can't be helped :roll:).

Experiment with how much but you really can't go by what he eats for the next two weeks as much of it will be nervous eating. Once he knows he will be fed, his eating patterns will change and I am betting he won't eat snails or hermits often.

Do give Fletcher a variety. One of the things to try while he is still nervous eating is a thawed frozen shrimp on a stick. The sooner you can get him/her to accept dead food (I think the hummelincki is more scavenger than some of the others and is easier to train to frozen) the better. If you can find whole saltwater shrimp at the grocery (most are freshwater, tank raised and these will work if you can't get wild caught) these can be a staple once they are accepted. Live (or frozen before there is ANY odor) fiddler crabs, an occassional opened or partially opened clam, piece of raw scallop (they don't seem to like these more than the first couple of offerings for some reason). For a smaller octo, shore shrimp either damaged or recently dead are readily taken. A handfull of these can be left live in the tank and may be snagged as an appetizer on occassion but they are too fast for everyday feeding.

You can put a live clam in the tank, he may or may not decide to open it but it will serve as a clean up critter if he leaves it alone (I have a photo of Octane or OhToo opening one - took him a long time). I put the clams (grocery store on ice - yes they survive) in a bucket of fresh seawater for a few hours and then in a separate tank for a day or two to clean out any pollution. A bucket with an air stone should work but I have a 10 gallon tank for live food that I use. Be sure to eliminate any that die very quickly or it will spoil the water and kill the rest. I find clams to survive better than mussels or oysters and are less damaging to the water quality if they die.

That photo looks like good avitar material!
 
Well, he is currently on a diet of mithrax crabs and shovelnose lobsters. It isn't cheap but my LFS which I think is fairly large compared to some others doesn't have any fiddlers in stock and all they have is emerald crabs so at 9 dollars a piece I don't think I can afford a dinner for myself, just kidding. but I am just waiting on my order of fiddlers to arrive from aquaculture store. Anyway, I was wrong about him eating the snails. He seems to just like to use them to cover the opening to his den. It is kind of funny actually he will put the nerite snails right over him and after a while they start to crawl away and they get about 5 or six inches away and he grabs them right back and puts them on top of him. The temperature of my water is a bit on the high side, It is 79 according to my thermometer and at one point today it got up to eighty. The room temp is only 72 and the heater in the sump is off so It must be the light. I'm going to install a cooling fan tonight and crank up the AC. On another note I think my lighting is too bright. He squints to the point where you can barely see his eyes when the lights on. 2x 55w 50/50 10,000k & Actinic T5 Power compact lamps is what I have, can someone tell me what I should change to? I tried to get a video of him feeding today however I forgot to loosen the head on the tripod and when I went to tilt down I couldn't so I missed it, I'll try again tomorrow. And hopefully more pictures.
 
I'll be sure to try that, thanks D. Also here is a video I took this morning when I fed him a crab. If you notice towards the end he pushes the shrimp away.
 
Makes me want to hurry up and get a lid on the new tank:mrgreen:

You do know that we have a video upload, right? One of the reasons Tony set it up for us was that over time links tend to go away but anything uploaded to the site (assuming no major upgrade problems) will be there for future viewers. You can find it by clicking on VIDEOS in the very top menu and then Upload Video. Be sure to pick Upload, you can switch from the Add Video link but anything you type in has to be retyped (voice of experience). Once you start the upload, go have a cup of coffee and whatever non-smokers do to take a break or open another window/tab 'cause it takes awhile. The links don't tie in with posts but after you load it, you can view it and then copy the link to the appropriate thread.
 
Yeah I know, but the videos are HD, and a fairly large file size so I just thought It would be better to upload them through vimeo.
 
Well he came out of his den twice today and showed some pretty neat looking displays with his skin. The second time he inked a little at me for no reason. I have some pictures. And he has eaten a couple snails in addition to his daily mithrax. Also for about three second tonight he made his mantle really big. It looked like a balloon that was going to pop, is this normal or something I need to worry about. Still trying to get some measurements of his mantle along with arms, he still has yet to come to the glass so I can't tell if it's a boy or a girl. I think I'll try to feed him a thawed frozen shrimp tomorrow. Also I'll be away from tuesday afternoon to thursday morning. It's alright if no one comes to feed and take care of him right, only for one day.
 

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His large mantle display was likely an attempt to make you think he was bigger than he is so that you would go away and not eat him.

One of the hardest things about keeping sensative animals is the insecurity of not being able to check on them a couple of times a day. I am never comfortable with a new octopus until it has been in the aquarium for two weeks. That being said, there is nothing you are actually DOING checking on them (execpt getting them used to your presence) so going away for a day will not change anything.
 
Thanks Nancy, I'm glad he arrived safe and healthy also. Thanks D for the explanation I just got scared. It looked like an alien was about to burst out of his head. Is there anything else I should keep in mind to do before I go away other than make sure the lid is kept closed? And if you'd like more video's I'd be happy to make more of him eating and or just roaming the tank. Also If I am leaving any information out of this journal please let me know because this is my first time at this. Also the light issue I mentioned earlier, any thoughts on that. What did you use for Octane?
 
If I understand the biology correctly, what we call eyelids function like an iris so squinting would be like our iris closing the opening to the pupil rather than a voluntary defense against overly bright lighting. What would be a normal opening, I have no clue.

I noticed both OhToo and Octane squinting as well but never changed the lighting (examine some of my pics on Octane's thread and I think you will notice it). On Octanes tank we used a single 55 watt (actinic/white) set 18" off the tank. OhToo's tank (now SueNami's) has one 35 watt compact (actinic/white). Reducing the lighting from 55 watt pc's to 36 watt pc's did not seem to help with the squinting. The new tank (replacing Octane's) will have 4 55 watt bulbs sitting directly on the tank so we may disable two of the bulbs or replace them with 36 watt bulbs. The lighting did not keep either octopus from coming out during the day and sleeping at night. You might experiment after Fletcher is fully acclimated and comfortable coming out during the day (at least 2 weeks) by using only room lighting to see if he fully opens his eyes (something I never thought to do :oops:).
 

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