• Looking to buy a cephalopod? Check out Tomh's Cephs Forum, and this post in particular shares important info about our policies as it relates to responsible ceph-keeping.

Mimic or Wunderpus?

sirreal

Vampyroteuthis
Registered
Joined
Oct 23, 2012
Messages
487
Location
Port Richey FL. 30 miles north of Tampa
Ok D I need help. I got a call from my LFS friend and he has A mimic octo. I am going to do as much research as I can about this species before I get it. I know that this forum does not condone collecting this species because they are somewhat rare. But he has it already and If anyone is going to take care of it and give this site as much info as possible It would be me. I am going to post the pic that was sent to me. If you could help me with an age and anything else you could think of would be great. What size tank should I have. This is going to happen very fast. My friend is bringing it to me on monday

 
I started a new thread in exotics for this one and sent you a PM with some of the TONMO places to look for care, other journals and arguments about keeping the animals we place in this category. I personally don't know what I would do if I found an exotic in an LFS. I did rescue a feather star once but I had successfully kept another for several years and they were convinced the thing was a juvenile crown of thorns and had killed corals in a new tank they had set up (and fully populated in one day :roll:). I visited twice a nautilus but did not buy it and it has haunted me ever since.

TONMO is somewhat split on "rescue" and sometimes I wonder about the anguish those who staunchly (and logically) support letting the individual animals die to discourage collection. Several have been successful in taking them off the market and still discouraging profit but these are usually acquired as fill and not ordered by the retail store or directly acquired from importers who are aware they probably should not have been collected.
 
So to give an explanation of how I came across this octo. My good friend who owns a pet store who got me both my O. briareus and my Merc octo. when his supplier told him he had this octo he jumped to get it. He called me very excited thinking I would be very happy about this. Well after an hour of explanations he now knows and will not deal in these anymore also he contacted his supplier and he promises not to deal in them anymore. "I know my buddy wont but the supplier" well !!!!!! My friend has only had a LFS for about a year and until I asked him he never bought or sold any octos so I feel guilty about this. I am paying him just what he payed. I asked my buddy to take more pics af the mantle and send them tomorrow. then we will know.Thanks.
 
The mantle spots/pattern is a unique signature for Wunderpus photogenicus (not sure about Thaumoctopus mimicus) so a picture from the top exposing the mantle, eyes and arms (also a difference in the striping) will positively determine its species (by Thales or one of our other members, I just have not gotten these two down).
 
I have read the last 3 years posts about the wonderpus "pretty sure" I will say I find it interesting how one person like Animal Mother gets one about the same way I did and he is welcomed and no one has anything negative to say about him keeping it, but so many others that have ended up with one are pounced on. I was so discouraged by reading all of this that I really thought about not journaling this octo. I will say that after reading Animal Mothers posts and the warmer welcome he received I feel better and will do it. There is not much info about Tank size and I know bigger is always better but I can have a 55 ready today where my 150 will take a week or so. I can set both up and move him latter but I really dont want to stress him anymore then I have to. Also I see the like a mud bed. I can get some of the miracle mud if you think that would be a good substraight. I am thinking of only putting rock on one side stacked up high to give more open sand or mud
 
Thales experimented with a mud environment but I don't recall any determination of benefit over a more traditional substrate and am not sure about the environment he has used for the several he has kept since. If I have my Fontanelle's straight the one he initially set up the muck emulation for started incubating eggs shortly after introduction. I am not sure if he maintained and used that environment afterwards.

Conservation is such a delicate balance and we have so very much to learn with time not being on our side. On one hand, hobbyists have been beneficial in their unrestricted experimentation. Cultured frags for hard corals as well as some captive breeding is progressing and has been the basis for some of the reef reconstruction work. The industry has created jobs for several poor countries but sustainability (as with fishing) is only beginning to make inroads. One thing that has occurred to me when I note possibly over reactive comments about the hobby is that people are taking an interest in ocean health, something that has been ignored for too long.

No one wants to see an individual animal die. The controversy here plays out when considering how to keep the hobby sustainable. IMO, If we were able to breed the questionable animals in captivity there would be an argument for keeping them but, so far, all small egg species simply don't survive in a captive environment and experimentation needs to be on similar animals that are plentiful. There is on-going work on raising O. vulgaris because it is a (human) food animal but part of the reason for the work is that even they are not as plentiful as they have been in the past.

On paper, we can all make a lot of conjecture about what is best but I suspect most of us would do (or want to) exactly the same thing. I know I will probably always lament not taking the nautilus I visited home as it was clear the store had no clue on its needs and was unwilling to research them.
 
Thanks D. for the record it is a wonderpus. Sedna's octo passed thursday. I will take pics and make a personal log. With the posibality of a very short life with me I think I will wait to post about him till I have had him for at least a month. If he makes it that long I will feel better about all of this.
 
sirreal;198354 said:
I have read the last 3 years posts about the wonderpus "pretty sure" I will say I find it interesting how one person like Animal Mother gets one about the same way I did and he is welcomed and no one has anything negative to say about him keeping it, but so many others that have ended up with one are pounced on. I was so discouraged by reading all of this that I really thought about not journaling this octo.


I would suspect that has to do with two things. AM was a longtime member of TONMO so people already know this was no flash in the pan animal keeping. We get a lot of first timers getting a ceph or exotic ceph as a lark and it is difficult to support that kind of approach to ceph keeping. As D mentioned above, it is an odd fence that we are all sitting on - we want to support cephs in all situations, but at the same time we really want to support responsible care. More importantly, the culture of TONMO has changed, and in the last few years people are less likely to get the same kind of negative response that they used to get (and back then at least some of the negative response was reactionary).


I will say that after reading Animal Mothers posts and the warmer welcome he received I feel better and will do it. There is not much info about Tank size and I know bigger is always better but I can have a 55 ready today where my 150 will take a week or so. I can set both up and move him latter but I really dont want to stress him anymore then I have to. Also I see the like a mud bed. I can get some of the miracle mud if you think that would be a good substraight. I am thinking of only putting rock on one side stacked up high to give more open sand or mud

When you say ready today or ready in a week or so, what does that mean?
 
I want to help the future of this species so this is the journal for Corki the Wonderpus. I named him Corki because of how he likes to keep his arms in kind of a corkscrew.
I got the wonderpus monday. I aclimated him for about an hour and released him/her. He went into the rocks as I expected and I didnt see him again till yesterday morning when I turned the lights on. Its a 30g tall with a sand bottom. No amo no nitrites and very low nitrates. salt at 1024. temp at 75. anyway his arms are 10+" long. he has been out for a couple hours and not shy. Every octo i have ever had has hid for several days and is skiddish Corki is not skiddish. He does not seem afraid of me Of course I have never had a wonderpus before and as you know there is very little info available. So yesterday when he was out he stayed to just one side of the tank and would go to the bottom for a min then back to the top and stick arms out of the water ever so slightly and sometimes his eyes. I really was worried about this he didnt seem to want to check out the rest of the tank. At about 1130 he went down in to the rocks and I didnt see him again. At about 530 I turned all the lights out and waited till about 7 to see if he would come out for dusk but nothing. I guess I should explain I have him at my shop in my office. I am not displaying him to the public because I dont want a some one to go looking for one after seeing mine. I would really like to know every ones thoughts about that. should I display him or not? So today i come in and turn the lights on and he comes right out. He seemed much more comfortable today. he was moving around the tank and exploring. He seems to like the water return and puts his arms in it. I have the smallest bait shrimp I could find but Corki has ignored it so I thawed a large krill and put it on a feeding stick and slowly touched his arm with it. he took it with the stick. He didnt eat all of it but about half which I thought was really great. He did eat at the LFS before i got him. He stayed out about the same amount of time as yesterday about 3.5 hours.
Corki will be my one and only wonderpus but I would like to keep him going as long as I can. I know its very common for them to die within the first couple of weeks.
To answer your question Thales the 150 is at home in the garage. I have a 100g tub with live rock and live sand with filters also. So setting up the 150 would be pretty simple and there would be very little cycle time since everything is already cycled. Plus i use a product called turbo cycle that I have used several time for my reef tanks in the past. I always keep 1 or 2 tanks running and ready to go. Never know what might come around. I have helped my reef club several times housing corals and fish when tanks crash or some one is moving.

Ok now some pics:

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Interesting thing going on. Corki came out for the evening hunt. "She didnt last night" and I thought let me try and feed again. I decided to try something different got a silverside thawed it and put it on a feeding stick and she is eating it right now. I could never get my others to eat silversides. We will see how much of it she eats but I think its A good sign for her to have A good appetite. Every time I bring the camera to the tank she fills out,opens the webbing and curls up like all the pics. I think its a defense. So just now I kind of snuck up to get this pic so everyone can see why she is named Corki. If you look close you can see her eating the silverside.
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