- Joined
- Mar 12, 2020
- Messages
- 5
Hi everybody, happy to finally be posting on this site!
My name is Gabe Somarriba and I'm a technician working in the Florida Museum's Ichthyology Collections. While I've kept many fishes both marine and freshwater, I was never able to keep a cephalopod until recently. You see we have a big 90 gallon marine aquarium in the lobby of our collections building stocked with some brittle stars, hermit crabs, sea cucumbers, urchins, a big ol slipper lobster, and until recently soapfish, toadfish, and a sergeant major; the soapfish nuked the tank with their toxic mucus and killed off themselves and the other fish. For a while it was an invert paradise and I figured I'd take the opportunity to go down to South Florida, visit my parents, and get some neat little blennies, gobies, and damselfish for the tank. What ended up happening is on my way down Friday night I stopped along the beach north of West Palm and searched among the partially submerged rocks with my headlamp. I saw what looked like a big, turquoise soft coral on a rock but, upon touching it and getting touched back, turned out to be a big beautiful Octopus briareus! I ended up finding 5 in total that night (two of which appeared to be spawning) and netted the smallest one for the museum's tank. I came away with a grand haul of one octopus, a heavily armored Calappa flammea crab, an urchin, and 2 nudibranchs.
The octopus survived transit in a bucket with an aerator and even ate a crayfish. I ended up putting it, the urchin, and the Calappa in the tank. She inked and immediately hid in a big pile of rocks, not coming out again until later that evening. It has now been 3 days and nobody has seen her (the aquarium is in a high traffic location and everyone in the museum is very excited about it, especially the IT department because the aquarium is right outside their door). At one point we thought it might have escaped, but the next morning we found the slipper lobster picking over the empty remains of the Calappa that I had so naively thought would be safe from a hungry octopus. The entire tank is fed daily with frozen scallops and shrimp, but I worry she may not be getting enough. I was thinking about putting a crayfish in some kind of container for her, thoughts? Really I'm just a little anxious but the information on this site has helped a great deal! We hope to see her soon!
Bonus Crustacean Friends pic included!
My name is Gabe Somarriba and I'm a technician working in the Florida Museum's Ichthyology Collections. While I've kept many fishes both marine and freshwater, I was never able to keep a cephalopod until recently. You see we have a big 90 gallon marine aquarium in the lobby of our collections building stocked with some brittle stars, hermit crabs, sea cucumbers, urchins, a big ol slipper lobster, and until recently soapfish, toadfish, and a sergeant major; the soapfish nuked the tank with their toxic mucus and killed off themselves and the other fish. For a while it was an invert paradise and I figured I'd take the opportunity to go down to South Florida, visit my parents, and get some neat little blennies, gobies, and damselfish for the tank. What ended up happening is on my way down Friday night I stopped along the beach north of West Palm and searched among the partially submerged rocks with my headlamp. I saw what looked like a big, turquoise soft coral on a rock but, upon touching it and getting touched back, turned out to be a big beautiful Octopus briareus! I ended up finding 5 in total that night (two of which appeared to be spawning) and netted the smallest one for the museum's tank. I came away with a grand haul of one octopus, a heavily armored Calappa flammea crab, an urchin, and 2 nudibranchs.
The octopus survived transit in a bucket with an aerator and even ate a crayfish. I ended up putting it, the urchin, and the Calappa in the tank. She inked and immediately hid in a big pile of rocks, not coming out again until later that evening. It has now been 3 days and nobody has seen her (the aquarium is in a high traffic location and everyone in the museum is very excited about it, especially the IT department because the aquarium is right outside their door). At one point we thought it might have escaped, but the next morning we found the slipper lobster picking over the empty remains of the Calappa that I had so naively thought would be safe from a hungry octopus. The entire tank is fed daily with frozen scallops and shrimp, but I worry she may not be getting enough. I was thinking about putting a crayfish in some kind of container for her, thoughts? Really I'm just a little anxious but the information on this site has helped a great deal! We hope to see her soon!
Bonus Crustacean Friends pic included!