Cephalopods: Octopuses and Cuttlefishes for the Home Aquarium

It’s December, and Squidmas is coming. Maybe you’re like me, and the kids have all moved out, so you’re thinking having a little intelligent life at home would be nice. Or maybe you’re kids are still home, and you think they’d love a pretty pet. Or maybe you just love cephalopods, as do we all, so you’re thinking, hey, let’s get an aquarium and an octopus! What a fun idea!

One word of advice: NO. Don’t do it. You can’t just rush into these things.

Here’s a positive suggestion, though. Start reading TONMO, the octopus news magazine online, regularly. If you haven’t been reading it already, you aren’t worthy of owning a cephalopod anyway. If you start dreaming about tentacles, then maybe you can consider feeding your obsession by planning to get a cephalopod of your own.

Second positive suggestion: buy a copy of Cephalopods: Octopuses and Cuttlefishes for the Home Aquarium(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) by Colin Dunlop and Nancy King. This is essential. All in one place and in a very practical way, it describes all the important information you’ll need to successfully keep a cephalopod in your home, and it may discourage all but the most fervent. Here are a few of the reasons you should not try to keep cephalopods, gleaned from this book and my reading of TONMO.

  • They are difficult to raise. You will need a well-maintained salt water aquarium, which with all the apparatus required can be quite expensive, and you will need to invest a fair amount of time every day in maintenance. This is a job for a serious aquarist.

  • They need live foods. What this means for most of us is that you’ll need two tanks — one for the octopus and another to raise the octopus’s food.

  • A cephalopod’s life is one of heart-breaking brevity. They do not live for long, even in the wild, so no matter what, you’re going to have a pet funeral every six months to a year.

  • There are few species that you can keep. Most can’t live in the confines of a tank, a few are very dangerous, and many are rare, and it would be unethical to strip natural environments of these precious specimens.

  • It will eat just about anything else you try to put in the aquarium. The cephalopod and its food will be the only creatures you will have.

  • Forget keeping one as a pet—a cephalopod in the house is your Lord and Master, and you will serve it everyday. Forget those silly ideas that this will be your little pal, it is going to rule you.

If you aren’t yet discouraged, then you know your proper place in the universe and can consider getting a cephalopod. In order to figure out how to do so, you will first have to buy this book: it contains all the information you will need to proceed. Plus, it’s beautifully illustrated with photographs of the beloved class, so you’ll enjoy reading it, and it therefore makes an excellent Squidmas gift. Then what you may do is purchase a salt-water aquarium and supplies, but at first you should only raise something boring, like damselfish. Master the art of maintaining a stable aquarium for at least a year, and then you may consider obtaining a cephalopod for it. Conceivably, then, you could have one for next Squidmas. But don’t even dream of it yet.

The radiation of deep sea octopuses

Last week’s Friday Cephalopod actually has an interesting story behind it. It was taken from a paper that describes the evolutionary radiation of deep-sea cephalopods.

First, a little background in geological history. Antarctica is a special case, in which a major shift in its climate occurred in the last 50 million years. If you look at a map, you’ll notice that Antarctica comes very close to the southern tip of South America; 50 million years ago, they were fully connected, and they only separated relatively recently due to continental drift.

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Weird creatures lurk in the depths

How odd — lots of people are sending me links to this video of a spindly-armed squid drifting through an oil-drilling site, but I’m pretty sure I posted this same video last year. I guess National Geographic just acquired rights to the footage.

It’s still a spectacular animal. And if that’s not enough, here’s a whole page of short clips of these Magnapinna squid in action.

Charismatic cephalofauna

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Christine Huffard sent me a note alerting me to the publication of her latest paper, and she thought I might be interested because I “seem to like cephalopods”. Hah. Well. I’ve noticed that Dr Huffard seems to have some small affection for the tentacled beasties herself.

The paper follows on an old tradition and an old problem. While people have no problem distinguishing human individuals, we have a tough time telling one individual animal from another. This perceptual difficulty complicates problems of studying variations in behavior or physiology, or monitoring numbers and behavior, in natural populations. One solution is tagging or marking the animals in some way, but that always has the risk of changing or harming the disturbed animals — non-invasive procedures are much preferred. This is an especially difficult problem with small animals, like zebrafish or small octopus; I’ve struggled myself with trying to track individual fish in experiments.

I came up with one solution, and Huffard et al. have come up with something similar: humans can be trained to recognize distinctive individual variations, and learn to identify single animals. In this paper, they describe a pattern of white pigmented regions that are consistent within single animals of the species Wunderpus photogenicus…and as you might guess, that is a great excuse to put together a collection of photographs of these aptly named animals.

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Uppity octopus

This is my kind of beast. Otto the octopus of the Sea Star aquarium in Coburg likes to cause trouble.

“We knew that he was bored as the aquarium is closed for winter, and at two feet, seven inches Otto had discovered he was big enough to swing onto the edge of his tank and shoot out a the 2000 Watt spot light above him with a carefully directed jet of water.”

…

“Once we saw him juggling the hermit crabs in his tank, another time he threw stones against the glass damaging it. And from time to time he completely re-arranges his tank to make it suit his own taste better – much to the distress of his fellow tank inhabitants.”

He was just expressing his cephalopodian nature militantly, I think.