hubert206;111821 said:
ok so i was reading up on it just NOW~ after buying them and was wondering.. will they really climb out of the tank? i was told they dont like the air ... and the 2 are mating now... so after the male dies.. then the female does that mean the eggs will survive hatch and will infest my tank with blue rings? do they hurt the fish? DID I MESS UP WITH MY IMPULSIVENESS??????
Ok, to answer some of the less critical questions here:
first, are you sure they're really blue-rings? Blue-rings, when agitated or excited, have a whole lot of blue rings all over their bodies, like our bluering icon
-- when they're sitting around bored, they just look brownish or yellowish, mostly. If they only have two spots that look like a pair of eyes, they are more likely a less dangerous octopus.
All octopuses kept as pets are prone to escape. They will happily climb out of tanks and wander around in the air for a few minutes. Obviously, they "don't like air" long-term, but they can and do like to explore in the air. If you have children, pets, roommates, and such, please do whatever you can to keep them out of the room with the tank. Some species, probably the ones that migrate between tidepools a lot in the wild, escape more often than others, but you should not assume that they will stay in the tank if it's not very well octo-proofed. And we've had members who have had their octos escape even seemingly completely sealed tanks; they're escape artists. We usually recommend a lot of duct tape, screens over all the inlets and outlets for the filtration and overflows and such, a plexiglass top or similar.
Any octopus will kill fish. They don't always, but putting an octopus with fish will often lead to the octo killing the fish. With their poison, blue-rings are more effective at killing any fish they attack than other octos, too. Sometimes they don't, and some fish are hard for octos to catch, and some (particularly damsels) will more often hurt the octos than the other way around.
Octopuses generally require a lot of effort to raise from eggs, and "infestation" is not going to be a problem. The immediate concerns are the octopuses killing you or your family or your fish. Neither octopus will die immediately after mating, but when they are sexually mature they do not have a lot of time left to live, but it may well be months. According to Norman's book, blue-rings lay large eggs, so they could be raised in your aquarium with a lot of effort, but it wouldn't be easy. As far as I know, it's not well-understood at what age the young have enough symbiotic bacteria to produce the toxins (although it may be in the eggs) or have enough to kill a human or have beaks big enough to break the skin. Since it's not known, if you see baby octopuses in the future, you should treat them with the same concern as adults. Roy may be able to provide exact details.
I do want to make very sure I come across as alarmist here: these animals are very, very dangerous. My personal belief is that they shouldn't be kept as pets at all, and certainly I think it is criminal negligence that pet stores sell these animals without warning customers that they are dealing with one of the most toxic animals on the planet. The venom, by the way, contains TTX (tetrodotoxin
Tetrodotoxin - Wikipedia ) which is a very potent neurotoxin, and the same one found in puffer fish.
There is a bit of good news, in that blue-rings are not very aggressive, and as far as I know there have been no cases of blue-rings killing their owners; most deaths have occurred when swimmers in Australia find one on the seashore and play with it. When an octo bites, it may or may not inject the poison. They don't leap out of the water and attack you like the movie "Alien" and they don't climb out of their tanks often, just occasionally. However, Roy's lab policy is a good indicator of the type of care required: paraphrasing from memory, I believe his requirements are that no one can enter the room alone, he always requires another person be present to dial 911 if need be, and he requires that everyone working with the animals be trained in CPR.
By the way, the effects of the toxin are a complete paralysis of the whole body except for the heart. That means that the victim stops breathing. The good news is that this is not permanent, it only lasts for a few days. The bad news is that if you stop breathing for 20 minutes, you die, so unless someone gives you CPR (or, more specifically, rescue breathing, since your heart is usually OK) or puts you on a respirator in a hospital or ambulance, you will be dead in 20 minutes, and you'll be completely paralyzed from shortly after the bite until death. Sometimes the paralysis starts within seconds or minutes, sometimes it takes longer, like hours.
As with any animal, it's hard to predict when they will bite, when they will climb out of a tank, or anything else, they have minds and personalities of their own. The real issue is that should they bite, the consequences are deadly.