• 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.

Responsibilities associated with keeping and breeding cephs

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A lot of us choose to raise the offspring, but not breed.

Breed-To cause to reproduce, especially by controlled mating and selection.

Not many people control the mating of their octopuses.
 
We shouldn't be keeping them because it could lay eggs that might grow up to adults that take a little while to find homes? he never said that he was releasing them. Just because he didn't find homes right away doesn't mean he is irresponsible...
 
cthulhu77;82824 said:
Hmmm. It sounds like several of us have though, doesn't it? Responsibility for the animals you rip out of the wild is not light.

And several of us have been successful. Let's hope that perhaps many more of us will be and can supply the demand with captive bred aquacultured specimens probably cheaper and take pressure off of the collection of wild species at the same time.

Having to assist in the euthanasia of too many hundreds of pets for a few years, I know what irresponsible ownership is.

I would imagine if anyone contacted online stores they could probably find some willing to buy/sell the babies.
 
That is a load.

Almost NO demand is out there for captive bred octopus's...most don't want to deal with the requirements that cephs tag along with them.
Until you have an established line of control for the youngsters, captive breeding is equal to bragging. Nothing else.
 
I think it's worth pointing out a couple of things about ceph biology that seem to have been overlooked in this discussion:

1) female cephs can store sperm for a long time, so often if you get an adult female, she can lay eggs even if you don't "bring in a stud." I'm not sure how many of the tank-raised female octos are separated enough that they can't have been fertilized by the ones they've been raised by, but certainly most wild-caught female cephs seem to be ready to breed.

2) cephs' reproductive strategy is "have a whole lot of babies, and most of them won't survive." Even in the case of cats and dogs, it's hard to find owners to give away a whole litter; if you feel obligated to raise all the octo babies, it's just nuts, and it's unnatural to expect that more than a small number would grow to adulthood, even in the wild. Heck, they eat each other. That's not to say that people shouldn't make some effort to treat the animals with respect, but as much as it's human/mammal/vertebrate nature to treat every baby as an important individual, in most invertebrates, that's anthropomorphizing to a degree that's really unnatural. Cephs, by virtue of having more brains and personality than most inverts (I know various folks would insist than I mention stomatopods and jumping spiders and maybe bees and mantids here) really do have enough individuality that there is a tendency to have the "every baby is a unique, lovable, individual," but the way the animals work in the wild doesn't really work so well with that. (As humans, we're also pretty inconsistent about that, in that we apply it to kittens and puppies, but not so much to veal, bacon, chicken, and turkey.)

I bet if we could have a conversation about this with an octopus, cuttlefish, or squid, it would think us goofy monkeys had some very odd and unrealistic attitudes... I imagine a cuttle or squid saying "well, yeah, joe was a great guy, but there weren't enough fish around, so I ate him (with fava beans and a nice Chianti)"

Anyway, raising cephs seems to have a difficult balance at best, and more likely an impossibile contradiction: either all the babies die, or a whole lot of babies live, and you have to find something humane and reasonable to do with them. Immediately. Before they eat you out of house and home and eat each other. And they have to each go to a new owner that has an octo-proofed tank big enough to hold an adult that has been cycled for 3 months and doesn't have a ceph or any fish in it. And they (by some standards) must also be prepared to care for hundreds or thousands of offspring that their new pet may produce.

There's a little more middle ground with cuttles, but seeing Cuttlegirl's recent experience with Baby A's eggs, she's had to struggle to find homes for the 91 eggs. And if just a quarter of the folks who got some of those eggs have their cuttles reproduce, I think we'll have saturated the Bandensis hobby market, at least insofar as it exists around TONMO.
 
Well, that certainly is a bunch of excuses.

No matter what, unless you can provide for the young, you have no business having the animal. Period.
 
cthulu7, where the heck do you get your "information?" i have personally worked at a zoo and have much exprience with animal breeding programs.

Captive bred animals are not allowed to be released into the wild. Period.

well that is a complete load of crap. i have witnessed and observed the process of the breeding program here at my local zoo for red wolves. the babies were born at the zoo. they were not allowed to be named or be interacted with. food was thrown in their cage and was eventually live food. 3 out of 7 were successfully released into the wild and all three are still alive to this day. the other four were sent to zoos in the aza breeding program that is specifically for breeding and sometimes releasing endangered species.

Almost NO demand is out there for captive bred octopus's

this is also untrue. those of us in the scientific realm, especially high school and college students doing research on octopi, are in need of captive breed octopi. it took me over a month to find a local store that sells captive bred octopi and it takes them at least a week to get it since the breeder is abuot 10hrs away by car. all the other stores just get a local fisherman or diver to catch them one, and it is often too tiny for research projects.

you don't know everything and you are not better than anyone, so stop acting like it. there's enough forum bullies out on the net, we dont need one here.
 
Well, it is not a "load of crap". Check your facts. The wolves that were released in Arizona...how many are still alive...hmmm. How about the wonderful Thick Billed Parrot program? They made great food for the Apache Goshawks. Desert Pupfish, Black Footed Ferret...shall I go on?

I also have worked in the zoo sector for decades. So what. Many of us here on the boards have.

Check with your local fishstore or dealer/wholesaler. All of the one's I spoke to had little to NO interest in buying or even accepting captive bred octopus.

No, I don't think I am "better" than anyone else, but I am allowed to have my opinion, and it is backed up by a lot of years in dealing with the public, and with the animals themselves.

Greg
 
cthulhu77;82969 said:
Well, it is not a "load of crap". Check your facts. The wolves that were released in Arizona...how many are still alive...hmmm. How about the wonderful Thick Billed Parrot program? They made great food for the Apache Goshawks. Desert Pupfish, Black Footed Ferret...shall I go on?


Greg

Well, to be fair,at least part of the problems with the survival rates of the Mexican gray wolves released in Az is poaching or poisoning by local ranchers. That's true for the Timber wolves up north too. Also, when the border patrol really tightened the border in El Paso and San Diego, smugglers, etc. started moving into a lot of the area where the wolves were released, followed of course, by the border patrol. All that human activity had a huge impact on the wolves, and when they build that expensive and probably worthless fence, it's going to further impact the wolves as well as jaguars, ocelots, jaquarundis, pumas, etc....
All the extra human activity along the border has also severely impacted the endangered long nose bat, and probably a lot of other species that I'm just not aware of.
 
Exactly my point. Wildlife re-introduction hardly ever works, because the niche has been either taken over, or is reduced.
Many of you are going to point to the success of the Peregrine Falcon re-introduction plan. It was indeed marginally successful, but most of the birds now gracing our skies are from wild stock. Thank god for pidgeons, I suppose...of course, they do carry West Nile, don't they? Most of the captive animals find their way into other zoos or breeding centers, and yes, it is wonderful to believe that all of this work results in the glorious achievements made by homo sapiens.

Any competent field biologist will tell you that once an animal is removed from the wild, it is genetically considered "dead".

When you release a captive animal into a wild situation, you compromise the delicate balance that ALREADY exists in that area. If you release bimacs, for instance, into an area that already supports O.bimaculatus...what are the wild ones going to do? There is only so much food or shelter available...and nature has a way of making that work.

It's never nice to fool with Mother Nature.
 
In general it is not a good idea to release captive raised animals to the wild. There are some situations where it has been done with some success such as some fisheries (salmon, trout, large mouth bass, red snapper etc.) there is still a debate on how much it helps or hurts the natural population and if the animals released survive. However, there has been indications that ut has been successful. One instance of great success in particular is the kemp's ridley sea turtle program where wild eggs where collected and raised to a curtain age and released. People should never release cative animals into the wild unless they aer permitted to do so. How many newly introduced species are there because someone released a aqurium fish into the wild (i.e lionfish on the east coast for example, caulerpa algae in california, hawaii and florida).
 
...or the bullfrogs in southwestern arizona that wiped out the local frog species, the cichlids that have killed off the pupfish, brown tree snakes eating the rare Hawaiian birds...the list goes on and on and on.

It does not work. It can't. Lifestreams adjust quickly to compensate for changes in the local flora and fauna...when we attempt to re-introduce a new animal, or even one that has been exterminated from an area, we upset the rythym. We are not gods, and should not pretend that we know more than the wildlife structure itself, as fragile as it may appear to be.
 
It can work to a point. As I said the Kemp's ridley sea turtle is a good expample, and I can give lots of facts to back it up, also Bald Eagle, White Sea Bass, the list can go on. To make a broad statement that there is no way any of them can work is absurd.
 
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