Bandensis breeding project

Zoafreek · Oct 19, 2012

I've been working with sepia bandensis for 6 months now, and recently have had great success with breeding. They started breeding about 3 weeks ago, at the age of ~14 weeks. The past 3 weeks they have produced over 100 eggs. I have a total of 7 cuttles and I believe 2 are female and 5 are female. I plan on keeping some of the eggs, raising them, and breeding one more time before I switch to a different species. I'm hoping to find flamboyant cuttlefish eggs, but if I can't I was thinking either bimac octopus or nautilus. The local aquarium is currently breeding nautilus so at least I would have a local resource to help.

Zoafreek · Oct 19, 2012

Zoafreek · Oct 19, 2012

Zoafreek · Oct 19, 2012

Here's their tank setup

revsgirl · Oct 20, 2012

Very cool!! Thanks for sharing!

SeymourDuncan · Oct 24, 2012

Eww! I love it. Always glad to hear of any kind of breeding...

wysiwyg · Oct 24, 2012

amazing job

notxes11 · Oct 25, 2012

totally cool man. good job on the setup there. what did you use for your source of live foods for the fry? did you culture?

Zoafreek · Nov 21, 2012

I am currently culturing mysids, but before I started doing that I would order them all online.

After hatching I would order mysids from:
aquaculturestore.com Paul Sach's is great to do business with (mysids are wild caught and great for starting out as they come in all sizes)
mblaquaculture.com For larger orders (meant for lab testing, they are truley aquacultured and all come adult size and in superb health)
liveaquaria.com has them as well, but they go out of stock a lot, are a little more expensive than the rest, and you never know for sure if they're coming or not

I would also fill a 5 gallon bucket on occasion, take pieces of live rock out of the system and shake it in the bucket, dropping off hundreds of amphipods and other critters. Worked very well in a pinch when out of food.

Once you get past mysid size I moved up to ghost shrimp

aquaculturestore.com
livebrineshrimp.com
and here and there I would feed freshwater ghost shrimp from the local pet store when they had them in stock
I also culture cherry shrimp that I would use in emergencies when I ran out of food, or a shrimp shipment was delayed a day.

Now that they're adults i was going to a local beach and pumping ghost shrimp out of the sand to feed them. worked well for a couple weeks and it appears the cuttlefish got 'sick and tired' of eating them. I asked around and there is the possibility that there is some sort of nutrition lacking from these shrimp and that's why the cuttle's stopped eating them. Now I stick with catching crabs and the equivalant of 'peppermint shrimp' on the west coast. I also feed regular grocery store frozen raw shrimp on occasion when they feel like eating them.