Lots of octopus, octopuses, octopi or octopodes

One of the local fish shops who I supply fish to asked if I would be interested in attempting to raise some octopus eggs that a female octopus had laid.  They had been expecting them to hatch soon and sure enough once I got them home and into a bucket to acclimatise to the tank I was going to put them in, I noticed that a couple were moving around.  I left them for about 30 seconds and came back to find two little octopus swimming around in the bucket.  Over the next hour five hatched and are all doing well about 6 hours later.

Bad/Unfertilized egg


Good Egg


Video of inside of an egg with a healthy octopus in it

 
Im about an hour old


Another one, this time im full of colour and running away from an Amphipod

 
I dont know the species of Octopus, other than the female was collected from the Geraldton area, she is approx 4-5" across the body with 8-10" legs.
I have put the eggs into the same setup I used for tumbling bangii cardinal eggs (beaker with a pump flowing into it to move the eggs).
 
About 2/3's of the eggs have visible eye spots and when I look at them under the camera macro lens, movement is seen (heart, wiggling etc).
 
The one above that has red dots its quite funny to watch.  I put some some small amphipod in with him/her.  They started to fight as amphipods tend to do, and the octopus went over to watch.  Once they were done, the octopus swam off.  It appears to be avoiding the amphipods.  Ill try them with some brine shrimp in the morning.

Very cool, Darren!  Do you have access to mysids?  Hopefully, Rich Ross will show up and offer some advice.  Meanwhile, have you checked in over at TONMO?  There is even a forum there called "Raising Octopus from Eggs": http://www.tonmo.com/foru...sing-Octopus-from-Eggs
 
Good luck with them!

Thanks for the info.
 
Im in two minds about food for these guys.  I put some amphipods in with them, but they are too big I think for anything other than interaction.
I was going to go and get some wild plankton from seawead, but on reading from TONMO, it seems like I can probably just use the same mix of roe, frozen cyclops etc that I use to supplement other fish.
 
I had expected them to want to take free swimming prey, but apparently they will take items like Roe, so Ill give that a try.
I was also going to add some newly hatched brine, but that appears to be a bad choice from what I have found so far.
 
I have them seperated into small containers, each floating in the hatching tank.  These containers have lots of holes drilled in them to allow for water movement.
Hopefully some more with hatch in the next few days and I can try different food approaches with various individuals.

Paralarval octopus are hard to feed. We haven't cracked that nut yet. Seems like your best bet is plakton tows, because they don't seem to eat pods at all. 

what pods have you tried Rich?

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Not to be flip, but I'll bet that the genetic gut analysis of wild clownfish larvae won't contain rotifers or BBS either! 
 
Is it known that ceph researchers have tried various copepods and failed?  How about Moina?  Peppermint or Cleaner shrimp larvae?

Similarly, have ceph folks had successes with various types of crab larvae?
 
The food geek in me is fascinated by this problem..
 

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One more thought I just had:  What about fish larvae?  I currently have Pseudochromis that are releasing 1500 or so larvae every week.  Mandarins spawn nightly, once they get going.  Unhatched Synchiropus eggs would be sitting ducks, and the prolarvae also would probably be easy to suck the innards out of.  I think you get my point.....

 
You will be hard pressed to find a rotifer in ANY larvae of the marine fish we use them on.  Gut content analysis only tells you what they get in the wild, not what they CAN feed on.
 
As your buddy across the bay, J. Stillman... doesn't he breed crabs?

what it does tell me is, they live in an area devoid of "pods"... did you really use that term?  UGH!

Thanks for the suggestions so far.
 
Unfortunatly plankton tow's are a no go here, as it requires a permit that is only really avaliable to institutions.  The fine for doing it is also on the harsh side (I have been told that its up to $20,000).
 
The best I can realistically do is the same as what I have been doing for the blue tangs which gets me free swimming "stuff/pods/larvae" and then sort the "stuff" to the size that I want.  Or what I was planning to do is collect sea weed and then shake it about in a bucket and collect what falls off.
 
At this stage of the five that hatched on the first day only one is still going.  A further three hatched yesturday and one of these is still going.  75% death rate within 24 hours. 
At this point the ones that have survived are bobbing about and seem to have got over their fear of amphipods and just ignore them. 
I added some rotifers and random copepods collected from my tanks to one last night, and for the next 5-10 minutes it swam away from everything, then calmed down.  I dont really know if it took any though.
Tonight Ill also try some NHBBS as well plus some more roe.

Im hopeful that some more of the eggs will hatch as there are quite a few that look good.

Also some more info on possible species identification based on the collection location
 
Possible
Octopus tetricus - Common Sydney Octopus
Octopus marginatus
 
Unlikely
Octopus cyanea - Big Blue Octopus
Octopus exannulatus (Octopus membranaceus)
 
At this stage from the description information I have found and the size of the female (approx as the female is near her end and my understanding is that they tend to shrink towards the end), I think that these are probably O. tetricus eggs.  Ill keep reading though and see if I can narrow it down.  I know very little about octopus so I am probably wrong.

Do you have a picture of the female that laid the eggs?

No I don't have a picture of her, she was in a fairly bad way and we didnt want to make her day any worse.  I do have some new information though. 

I have been contacted by one of the Marine Aquaculture Scientist's at Department of Fisheries, Western Australia who confirmed the species to be Octopus tetricus or "Common Sydney Octopus" and has offered some advice on feeding the paralarvae.
 
Thats the good news, the bad news is that so far the ones that have hatched have only lasted 6-12 hours in general, one did survive for about 30 hours.  Hopefully the others will hatch and be better survived.  So far 17 have now hatched in total plus another 6 have been stuck trying to get out of the egg.
 
I took the oppertunity to do some timelaps photos last night.  These were done in very low light with about 5 seconds of exposure per shot.  A new shot was taken every 30 seconds.  This was then processed via photoshop to improve the exposure and provide some sharpening and image quality adjustments.  Finally the 174 shots were combined into a video.  In total this shows about 90 minutes of activity.  In the photos below there are a couple of babys that have hatched to soon and still have egg yokes (I think) that didnt make it.
 
If you look at the individuals, you will see colour flashes, movement within the eggs and movement of the eggs (mostly in the bottom left and top centre).


 
I am thinking about removing the dark coloured eggs on the left, brown in the centre and the one that looks quite pink on the right hand side as I assume these are all bad.
 
In total this is about half of the eggs that I have.  The rest are larger and puffier, but you can see less detail in them.

See if this is helpful for information on feeding the hatchlings http://www.alaskasealife.org/New/visitors/aquarium-species-updates.php
 
Also http://www.thecephalopodpage.org/rearing.php
 
And there was another paper that said feeding BBS enriched with AlgaMac or Spirulina maxima had superior growth compared to unenriched http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0044848609000489
 
Good luck and keep us posted!

http://link.springer.com/...e/10.1007%2FBF00389194
 
They got them to 22 days - that is the general upper limit that people have been able to get paralarval octopus to survive. 
 
Artemia is not acceptable as a long term food - sometimes octopuses eat it, but they end up dying - the experiment has been run enough times that we don't think it needs to be run again. 
 
I wouldn't remove any of the eggs from the 'festoon' as messing with them can often will cause other eggs to hatch prematurely, the larva with some unabsorbed yolk sac, and such individuals usually have a very short life.
 
Here is a link to a short article about working with both large and small egged octopus. 
http://packedhead.net/2013/wonderful-wunderpus/
 
Here is a link to a short article with pics and video of paralarval octopus hatching
http://www.tonmo.com/blog...s-(vid-and-pics)