Chrono War said:
I doubt that there's a market for a octo-as-a-pet industry that's profitable without having the price per octo raised. Either we get more poeple into this hobby or we'll have to signify that those that want octos as a pet would rather pay more than have no octos. As long as they can sell enough octos to go pass the break-even point and gather some proft, the'll start thinking about it.
If you raise the price, you sell less octos. When you're hatching hundreds at a time, you might as well sell as many of them as you can for as cheap as you can to get maximum revenue. Maybe a half dozen TONMO'ers will pay $100 for a bimac, but at the lower price you would have sold dozens to the "WhErE cAn i gEt a BloO RiNg" crowd.
The reason that Octopets was selling them real cheap is the same reason why internet startups lose hundreds of millions of dollars per year starting up...take Vonage, which lost over a $100m in the last three quarters. They've spent about $120m on marketing. As a result, a couple years after inception, the company has over one million subscribers. If they had started out trying to be immediately profitable, they'd have a few thousand customers and make a few million dollars or so. Now, in a year or two they can cut back their marketing and bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in profit.
I think octopus breeding could be profitable, but only under the right conditions. You need an aquarium fish operation that's big enough to have plenty of people standing around. I would say it is within the realm of many larger fish shops. This is how I interpret what Marine Depot told me: "Yeah, maybe we could make $500-$1000 a year on it. But for the amount of money that moves through here, that just isn't worth the effort." And they're right.
Even if a sole-proprietor had the equipment and the feed farm to start at no-cost, a year's worth of income wouldn't feed him/her for a month, much less a year. If we see captive-bred octopus again, it won't be someone's day job.
bmatson said:
What is the difference between O. bimaculoides and O.bimaculatus? Is it size? I remember something about the false eyespots being different.
Without going back to the library, I think the "link" structure of the eyespots is most diagnostic. They have small eggs with planktonic larvae, but you can hardly tell that from looking at them. I know I've heard it mentioned that the maximum size is different, but since that varies so much between different wild populations of
O. bimaculoides, I'm skeptical of how useful this is.
I can't come up with a good reason why their octopus wouldn't be
O. bimaculatus, though. The two species have a similar range, and I don't know about relative abundance. I kind of hope someone buys one or both of Marine Depot's octos and takes some pictures
Dan