[Octopus]: KaySoh - O. briareus

dwhatley;147159 said:
Has anyone else seen this phosphorescent effect(click to enlarge) before or does KaySoh have some very strange tankmates?

I thought they just had to get big enough to see that "effect." I see that in the monster worms in my tanks but I don't pay much attention to the smaller ones.
 
I have noticed the dark area but never the opalescense and wondered if it was something they were eating (although there is nothing known that is different in this than than my others). I will have to pay more attention to the worms in the other tanks.
 
KaySoh is beginning (finally) to socialize a little more. She won't come to my hand in the tank yet but she will cross over to the opposite side if I stroke the glass when she comes out for the evening. I am working on trying to get her to come through either the top or bottom tube, depending on where my fingers are but so far she only puts an arm in the upper tube and then goes through the bottom one. She does, however, come all the way across the aquarium and up to my fingers in the far corner and is doing this with some regularity. She seems to want to come up to my fingers in the tank but can't quite get up the nerve. She will touch my fingers and leave her arm tip there without pulling so I think we are making trust progress.

If you watched the above video, you will notice how close she is to the lower tube when she dumps the sand. Now there is sand in that tube and when I clean it out, I find more in it the next day so she may want sand there for some reason. I have removed a lot of sand from the right side and have not seen her shoveling so I will clean out the lower tube again tomorrow to see if this is coincidence of if she is purposefully putting it there.

She is also playing with the plastic ice cube now, even when there is no food attached. I hope to get a better video as I was too late to get any real suggestion of playing in the one I took tonight. SueNami played with this cube for quite some time before she tired of it.
 
KaySoh has been very shy again for the last week (as has Creepy) and I am afraid the cooler weather may have started a biological clock. Both Octos have rearranged large shells/LR in their tanks this week. KaySoh moved one out of her den area but tried to bring two LARGE (relative to her body) pieces from the left side, through the tube and to her den side of the tank.

I also have a video of KaySoh playing with the plastic icecube that SueNami enjoyed. SueNami played with it for several weeks but we have only see KaySoh do this a couple of times.
 

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It looks like KaySoh has officially stopped eating as it has been about a week since she last accepted a shrimp. I saw an arm out around feeding time tonight so I pestered her with a shrimp. She came out from behind the LR enough for me to see fully into the arm center (the beak was not visible) but no matter where I touched her with the shrimp, she refused to take it. Eventually she got tired of my attempts and started pushing the feeding stick away. When I persisted to try to get her to taste, she went back behind the rock. It was kind of an odd meeting as she did not seem at all afraid of me but she did not appear to be aggressive even when she turned her mouth up to the stick.

She rearranged her rocks on the right so much that I could not clean the aquarium so today I restacked some of them (she tried to drag the same large rock through the tubes again last night and almost succeeded this time.) I tried to annoy her enough so she would go to the left side but she would only go to a vacant corner and watch and wait until I was done. I did not see any eggs but tried to minimize my impact and could have missed them. I noticed her breathing heavily for no apparent reason earlier in the week and thought she might be laying eggs but I could only see part of her mantle under the rock and not her eyes (I noticed and Nancy confirmed something similar with Ollie that when Maya was releasing eggs her eyes would dilate). The eggs won't be viable when she does release them so I was not concerned about upsetting them with my reconstruction. I am considering pestering her in hopes that she might come out some during her brooding period. It is so sad when they brood and with no viable eggs I don't think I can do any real harm. It might stress her into an earlier death though so I am not sure how I will approach it.

Edit: I added a couple of pictures of her second attempt at moving the same rock from the left to the right side of the aquarium.
 

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Sorry to hear that she may be laying eggs. How long have you had her? 3 months? I guess that's the only downside to keeping Octos, the short life span. I would hate to bury an Octo every 3-6 months. Maybe I'll get lucky and get one that is abstinent :razz:
 
Unfortunately abstinence does not help. In KaySoh's case, she has never mated. Females will brood when 'it is time' regardless and males will become senescent as well. There is some indication that the life cycle brooding event can be delayed (or startd early) through envioronmental conditions but the formula is unknown. Studies suggest that once it starts, however, it cannot be reversed.
 
From my experience, food is the one factor that has a major impact on when females reproduce. I wish we knew what role mating history plays, but I don't know of any hard data on this.

Roy
 
Roy, do you mean that an abundance of food or paucity of food or frequency feeding rather than amount will start the maturation process sooner? I am assuming abundance from prior communications but your bimac was male and the quantity you mentioned once seemed to be about the same amount of actual food as our daily feeding with a one day fast.

Tony, most of my tanks are the typiclal "pile-o- rock" setups with an attempt to create caves and allow enough room around 3 sides for cleaning without compromising the stability of the structure. If I had taken a series of stills of the rock pile on the right, mostly what you would see is a tall pile of rocks with a sand border become flattened pile of rocks that touch all the walls. The interesting part was that she would not go to the left side while I was restabalizing the rock. She did not reach to touch me with a somewhat typical "warning touch" and she did not seem aggressive or even upset, she just waited until I was finished and then went back to her remodeled den.
 
KaySoh is pretty much confined to her den now but seems to eat if I throw a crab where it will enter the den. We see an occassional arm but no evidence that she moves about at night (no more rocks in the tubes but I did move the one she wanted to her side). When I cleaned her tank yesterday she did not even show an arm to object to the disruption so I lifted one of the rocks that makes the top of her den to check on her. At first I did not see her but left the rock off a bit until the water cleared a little and realized that the rock on the bottom was not a rock but mantle and eyes. Her mantle looked huge from that prospective. Her color is still good but I have learned that it can change to the deathly grey overnight. Since I know she does not have viable eggs (I don't know if there are even eggs left) I have seriously thought about dislodging her to see if she would become more active. It is hard for me to do but for her to just waste away with no young to hatch is so sad.
 
Roy, in addition to food, what about water temperature?

D, I did have the experience that my octopus became more active later, after laying infertile eggs. She never engaged in the activities she did before, but she moved about the tank and would respond. The funny thing is that she always kept one arm on the rocks that made her den,
but that gave her a lot of freedom of movement.

Nancy
 
KaySoh has stopped coming out at all. I may remove the top rock that makes her den (she is totally concealed) to see if she will come out. I would not bother her if the eggs has even a slight chance but they don't and she is worth a bit of experimentation. It may stress her to an even earlier death.
 
I moved the rock from the top of KaySoh's den so that it is open and she has been slightly more active. She still has places to hide but the brood den was intentionally disrupted. She came out the first couple of days and even played with my hand a couple of nights (something she had not done before) and will come to the front of the LR some evening around supper time but she is very weak and her color is spotchy (but not yet grey). Tonight she tracked my finger on the outside of the aquarium for a short time but did not come out of her hole and did not investigate for very long.
 
I rewatcher her videos, I am still hoping for Ollie to open a jar but he seems uninterested. Your container looks like plastic, how do you keep it from floating? The one I have is glass. I feel that familiar twinge in my heart reading your last post. It's too bad these guys have such a short time with us but it's so worth it.
 

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