Help with cuttlefish eggs

[tonmo]

Hi gang, @kahuna75 has access to some large cuttlefish eggs, about 100km from his location in Italy... He wanted to know if it is possible to save the baby cuttlefish and breed them before releasing them to the ocean. Any advice, or interest, in helping with this project?

 

[DWhatley]

Releasing anything back to the ocean after it has been kept in a captive tank is highly considered undesirable because of the chance of contamination. There are a few coastal, public aquariums that do this but they maintain their tanks with native sea water and only native inhabitants.

 

[kahuna75]

Hi Everybody!
The sephia eggs are inside a livewell of a fisherman boat. He used to live the livewell all time on with some cuttlefish in for fishing with them. This time as in other occasion, sephia release their eggs and I was thinking in some way to keep them, just raise the babies for a while and then release them. I really dont know how to do it. How many time the egg will exclose? and then babies feed only on live shrimps? can I feed them wih artemia salina? Many thanks

 

[DWhatley]

Unfortunately, artemia will be eaten but do not have enough nutrition for cephalopods to survive. Additionally, if the artemia are not native to your water they can add unnatural pathogens and hydroids if you attempted feeding them in an open water environment (like the livewell). Your safest method to encourage some of the hatchlings to survive and then be set free would be to attempt to keep them in something similar to the livewell and then feed a daily plankton tow --basically run a net through the local seaweed and dump the contents into the livewell, cleaning out the prior day's waste.

 

[kahuna75]

Thanks so much for the tips!