Inka - O. briareus

DWhatley

Kraken
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Cape Coral, FL
On June 29 I received two beautiful young briareus from Lynn (Island Marine Life) and Kara (SeaLifeInc). Both were hand caught in the keys, the larger near the top of a reef (snorkel depth) and the other under a bridge. Sadly the larger animal did not live out the day and I have no answer as to why.

Inka was more active than the larger animal and I hoped she did not suffer the same fate but until this AM at 5:00, I did not know (inspite of searching the tank nightly). I finally spotted Inka with a red light and was able to thaw and offer a chunk of crawfish on a stick. I think she must have consumed most of the pods (the snails have been ignored) because she took it quite easily. Tonight, I tried finding her again around 8:30 pm with no success but just after I turned off all the lights and scanned the tank with the red light (around 10:00 PM), arms came out of the LR and she ate, with less gusto, another piece of crawfish tail.

Judging from the spindley arms and comparing her acclimation photo to one of Cassy I think Inka is about 6 weeks old


Cassy at 6 weeks
 

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I need to go back to the rest of Cassy's photos as it appears Inka's eyes are still blue so she may be slightly younger but for the purposes of longevity 6 weeks should work close enough.

Corpusse, I am just glad to finally have seen her and fed her you are way ahead with the up front den.
 
They were shipped FedEx and I picked them up at the local FedEx office (that just happens to be directly across the street from my office :biggrin2:). You did not miss anything though, I just started the journal yesterday.
 
Inka's Untimely Death

I almost posted the scary behavior I saw with Inka last night but kept hoping I was over-reacting. Sadly, I was not. She came out of the LR around midnight and her eyes looks odd in the redlight. Where normally you see the eye, it was totally white. I hoped this was an oddity of the redlights but felt uneasy about the look. She did detect my red flashlight but refused food (this is the first time she had not accepted food and had doubled in mantle size since arriving). Later I saw her near the top of the tank at the overflow with the tips of her arms corkscrewed (not just curled). When I offered food again she was agile and went to the LR so I hoped I was over reacting but this AM she was out in the open and not alive.



I have no idea why she died. She appeared healthy, was obviously growing and active. The only far fetched thing I can come up with is that we are redoing a bathroom shower and there has been fiberglass in the air from removing the old unit (it had to be sawed into several pieces to be removed). Both Inka's and Tatanka's tanks have fully open sumps that might collect air born particles easily. I have three other tanks in the room, including Little Bit's and we have not seen any problems with the other tanks but they are either sumpless or the sump is partially (not fully) covered. The heat and AC system for that room is separate from the room under reconstruction so there would not have been transfer by the duct work. I am reaching for straw but coming up empty.

Recently, the Architeuthis finding in FL brought discussions about the suckers sticking to anything after death. I had not noted this in other octopuses but there was no mistaking the attachment with Inka when I tried to position her for a last photo.

 

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I'm not doing too well with the loss of this one. :cry: and keeping a watchful eye on Little Bit but none of the softies show any signs of water pollution (did test nitrite and ammonia and got the expected zeros).
 
My father in-law is a pathologist by profession, and has been keeping aquariums for forty years. When he has an unexplained fish death, he goes into full Quincy mode, pulls out the microscope, and figures out why. Often the cause is a parasite, or something else that would not be detectible without his advanced tools and training. The rest of us have to accept that we're in the dark. You've only had Inka for three weeks, and there's any number of lethal things that she might have come into contact with while being held by the wholesalers, maybe sharing water with lots of exotic critters. Don't blame yourself; you know you're very good at keeping these things alive. And since almost nobody has the knowledge and equipment to determine the cause of death, you'll just have to shrug, and accept that you'll usually never know what killed any octopus that dies prematurely.
 
Thanks Joe but she was not from a wholesaler and both this one and the other I got at the same time died for no known reason. Nothing else in the tank is odd but I only have a few softies and a serpent star in the tank (the serpent is on the side she where she could not go). I used a piece of fiberglass screen to divide tank and I wonder if something could have been on the screen.

I am always worried for the first two weeks and she almost made that but not quite, the other did not live out the day. I am fretting still and will leave the tank filtering empty for awhile but wish I had a clue.
 

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