Recent content by Animal Mother

Very cool Tim. I hope you have great success with it. You might try making it a muddy area with some special refugium mud. They love to dig and their natural habitat is muddy. Keeping Mimics/Wunderpus/Zebra's is controversial. Very rare animals both in the trade and in their own habitat. I'm...

I believe Grover is a female. I haven't noticed any indication otherwise. Kalypso is a male. He has obviously over-sized suckers on some of his arms which is a male physical trait. The male octopuses third right arm is called the hectocotylus. The tip is different from the rest, usually spoon...

No. I have been fortunate enough that I haven't had any accidents like that. I changed my powerheads to Koralia's because I read people were having good success keeping nudibranches and the likes from being killed by them, and so far the octos have climbed all over them without losing any limbs...

Yeah I was hoping he would demonstrate the octopus' ability to slip into small places. I've made many attempts but he's already figured out he doesn't have to in order to get the prize inside. He'll tug on the shell for a while trying to get it out, but loses interest after all the meat's gone...

Pictures of this one aren't great. I took the stills with a video camera so blurring was inevitable. I have tons of pics of this one, but they all turned out rather terrible. O. hummelincki (Caribbean 2-spot Octopus) "Tuvalu"

O. meractoris (dwarf octopus) "Einy" He was TINY! (next to turbo snail shell)

A few decent pics of my previous octos. We didn't get the nice camera until recently and that's when I went nuts with the photos. I'll post them tomorrow.

I feed mine by just dropping the food items in the tank. When I first get them I put it on the end of a wooden skewer but they will grab ahold of it and take it with the food, and trying to get it back is like trying to pull a tree out of the ground. Once they learn to associate you with food...

That's why I joined! I wanna spread good information so people interested will be less intimidated by the "expert only" tag and "Extremely difficult" label that tends to go with the idea of keeping an octopus. The thing that I believe has led people to the misconception that they are extremely...

I would already like to have her in a larger tank. The typical suggestion for O. briareus is 75 gallons, but I'd suggest a 100 or more really. As long as she doesn't grow too much more she'll be fine where she is. I'd just like for her to have more room to actually swim. She could grow quite a...

75 gallons

Northwestern edge of Fort Worth, 10 minutes from Texas Motor Speedway.

Yeah. There is a lot of bubble algae and while it's usually seen as a nuisance I consider it decorative. I can't keep a lot of stuff in the tank that I would like to keep (for fear of Kalypso destroying it) so I just let the algae go crazy and fill in the gaps and I occasionally prune it back...

Yup, I bought it at Home Depot in the windows and doors department. Comes in a big roll, way more than you'll need and it's cheap. Non-stingy corals and lots of macro-algae. There are a few serpent and brittle stars as well, and whatever snails Kalypso hasn't eaten yet.

Duncans are great. A great investment too considering the conditions of Australian coral imports. Mine aren't growing more heads very fast, but the heads that were already there when I bought mine went from dime-sized to 50-cent piece sized.