zebra/mimic/wonderpus

[Thales]

Thats the point, it seems beyond our capabilities at this time. Do some browsing on this forum and other regarding rearing free swimming larve in both fish and cephs - its not at all easy in either case, if its actually been done in captive systems at all.

I have access to free live foods that could be tried, but I don't want to do it, especially with wunderpus because of wild population issues and the fact that it would be incredibly labor intensive. If you really want to try it, try it with some other, not as endangered small egged species. If you could do that consistently and successfully, you might get some support here for trying it with wunderpus.

I understand the drive to want to try to breed them, but their declining wild populations and the difficulties raising the paralarvae make wunderpus a poor choice to learn on.

 

[daddysquoc]

u might want to look at a vulgaris if u want to try small-egg breeders

 

[fishkid6692]

only problem with vulgaris is that i can't have multiple 200g tanks. how would i go about breeding an octopus? do i keep a few octos together?

 

[esquid]

If you don't have space for two 200gal tanks how will you have space for multiple broodstock, growout and feed culturing tanks?

 

[daddysquoc]

i read somehere if ur gonna breed octos, put a male and a female (be sure) into a tank with a clear divider. the divider should have an opening in it just big enough for the male to get his modified third right arm through to mate.

 

[monty]

To get good results with an easier large-egged species, Zyan and his family used their whole garage, and a whole system full of tanks. Octopets was even bigger, and used an open seawater system. I think marinebio_guy used a bit smaller setup, but had access to fresh seawater and an entire research lab. And that's for the "easy" large-egged species.

Small-egged species have only ever been raised in marine labs that had millions of dollars of resources available and were locate extremely close to the water. There is a paper here:

http://www.tonmo.com/community/index.php?threads/11406/#post-11405

that describes the setup used by researchers at a marine lab in Spain to culture vulgaris.

All that being said, if someone really wanted to try raising a small-egged species, I would think the best place to start would be bimaculatus since the care requirements once the young have grown a bit are identical to bimaculoides which we understand pretty well.

I'm concerned, though, that all breeding programs for octopuses or squids are pretty much likely to be a nightmare. Since almost all of them only brood once at the ends of their lives, and essentially lay a whole lot of eggs at once, there is either a dearth or a plethora of offspring at any given time. In the wild, the young are dispersed to a wide area, and can find their own territories and dens and food sources. In a closed system, they never have the opportunity, and this can lead to fratricide and cannibalism, as well as less drastic overcrowding, and also the far more pragmatic problem that there will frequently be far more small octopuses than could find homes, so despite having put maybe $100 into raising each octopus baby, only a small fraction of them can be sold.

Keep in mind that most cephalopods, and particularly small-egged octos, are what are called "r-strategists" in that they produce far more offspring per brood than the local environment can support, and naturally have a low survival rate and a very wide dispersal of offspring. Any attempt to raise them in captivity can't reproduce that.

 

[cthulhu77]

If a large public aquarium was to approach this task, I would be supportive of it.
In the private sector, I think it is a waste of animal's lives.