My Octo broke its leg.....

[Vee]

I have a mimic it is around 8months old and it appears to have severed its leg. I only noticed yesterday. I have just seen him tonight and he is swimming around with the remains of his leg curled up in his mouth, at first i thought he was eating his leg but it seems that he is just protecting it as it is damaged. Any advice on what i can do to help him recover?

 

[monty]

to TONMO. I don't believe we've seen this in mimics or wunderpus, but in general octos can heal on their own if it was caused by outside forces. A thing to watch out for is autophagy, though: there are both diseases and stress reactions that cause octos to bite their own arms off... make sure to check your water parameters and anything else that might be stressing the octopus out and leading to this behavior.

We try to keep discussions of mimics and munderpuses in the Exotics section since we discourage their collection in the wild until their population levels are better known, so Tony may move this thread over there, but I'll leave it alone for now so you can see this information (such as it is.)

 

[Vee]

Thankyou for your help. How do you mean 'outside forces'? I added more live rock to his tank and fear that i may have infact caused this damage to his leg although i was extremeley careful. Following your advice I have established that the phosphate is high in his tank so am acting on this. He is sat at the back of his tank now at 11.30am and in the 6months I have had him, he has never made himself visible in the daylight. I was concerned that this is a sign of him being unstable. On a few other threads that I have read, other members have said how the unfortunatley lost their octos after a leg had been lost?

 

[monty]

Thankyou for your help. How do you mean 'outside forces'? I added more live rock to his tank and fear that i may have infact caused this damage to his leg although i was extremeley careful. Following your advice I have established that the phosphate is high in his tank so am acting on this. He is sat at the back of his tank now at 11.30am and in the 6months I have had him, he has never made himself visible in the daylight. I was concerned that this is a sign of him being unstable. On a few other threads that I have read, other members have said how the unfortunatley lost their octos after a leg had been lost?

The most common "outside" problem that leads to arm injuries is the octo investigating powerheads or other circulation devices with pumps. Since you just added more live rock, though, another fairly common thing is that the octo, while investigating the new live rock, can pull over some rock on itself. The only other thing I can think of is that there was some sort of hitchhiker on the live rock that could cause damage, but that seems relatively unlikely.

 

[Vee]

my octopus died this morn, it chewed off one of its legs a few days ago and had been acting weirdly since, i was told they can repair their legs. is there anything i could have done? like melofix? any ideas much appreciated.

 

[Jean]

my octopus died this morn, it chewed off one of its legs a few days ago and had been acting weirdly since, i was told they can repair their legs. is there anything i could have done? like melofix? any ideas much appreciated.

I don't thinks so, it may have been near the end anyway, they can do this when they are senescent. The other possibility is autophagy disease, there is NOTHING you can do about this (except euthanasia) the jury is still out but it seems that it may be caused by a prion (like mad cow disease) it is always fatal and extremely infectious to other cephs. Did your octo chew the arm off close to the body? This is a symptom of autophagy (if it didn't it was old age or some other reason) if this is the case you MUST thoroughly sterilise your tank and anything you use in it, get new substrate, everything else soak for about a fortnight in a 10% bleach solution, followed by a fortnight in freshwater, then a fortnight in fresh saltwater......only THEN can you begin to recycle your tank. You can't miss a step in this or shorten the time.......we tried with horrible consequences

Sorry, hope it wasn't autophagy


The Bobtail sounds like old age, this is how all ours went (when they didn't eat each other!) and there was no problem with our water......course it never hurts to check!
J

 

[monty]

since I see in another thread that the poor octo didn't make it, I'm going to move this thread to "Exotics."

 

[monty]

my octopus died this morn, it chewed off one of its legs a few days ago and had been acting weirdly since, i was told they can repair their legs. is there anything i could have done? like melofix? any ideas much appreciated.

I'm sorry to hear that your octo didn't make it. RIP

I moved the thread on it to the "Exotics" forum because of the species, there should be a temporary redirect for a week. I'm going to copy the posts from this thread related to it over there, so that people know what happened, if my "thread-adjusting kung fu" is up to that.