sindas;101250 said:
tad harsh fish freak
if it doesn't except thawed then i'll get live, not that big of a deal. and on the guide on this very website it said that babies like ghost shrimp.
it also said they eat clams as well.
thats why i asked. and tons of places online said they feed theres freshwater clams. and there octos are healthy.
I don't think FishFreak meant to be harsh, but he is right-- we definitely don't recommend a diet of mostly freshwater animals. Jean (who raises cephs professionally) is particularly vocal about pointing out that freshwater animals don't have the proper balance of nutrients for cephalopods, although they're happy to eat them, so it's OK to give them as a treat, but if they're the bulk of the animal's diet, it's likely to be malnourished.
There are also salt water ghost shrimp, which may be what was meant, although there have been octos who survived on freshwater animals; it's not "instant death," it just seems from reports of octos over years that those fed saltwater food are overall healthier. However, if you remember which guide mentions ghost shrimp, we may want to clarify that.
A lot of the recommendations here are "best practices" that are conclusions from people with a lot of experience in octo keeping. I tend to think that the collected wisdom here is usually better than the largely anecdotal octo keeping reports on other sites, not just because I like it here, but because we often see links to "some guy says he kept an octo and..." or "the LFS that sold me the octo said..." but when people try to repeat these experiments, they often come back and say "my octo is dying/dead, what's wrong?"
edit: It looks like the bimac care sheet says "Young octos may be given ghost shrimp, which are easier for them to catch than shore shrimp but are not suitable for long-term use."
I think that's about accurate, in that if you're trying to get the octo to eat something, or ghost shrimp are all you have, it doesn't hurt them to eat ghost shrimp, they just won't be healthy if that's the main staple of their diets... that's why they're "not suitable for long-term use."