FAQ
A contribution of The Cephalopod Page
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From Simeon: I presume your lab reared animals are not subject to the pressure experienced by wild animals. If so, could you please answer the following Qs: (and if not, could you tell me a little about hyper baric aquaria) |
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| Bathypolypus arcticus are found from 13 to 1500+ meters although they are most common in 200-600 meters. Mine are collected in scallop draggers at around 100 m. Some (5%?) do show signs of what I take to be damage from the change in pressure (and perhaps temperature?). These may live after collection but always seem to be not quite right.
How successful have you been in lab rearing deep sea octopuses? More successful than anyone else but compared with others work with tropical species, not as successful as I'd like. For instance, of the hundred or so hatchlings from last year only about 9 are alive now. However, no one else has kept hatchling deep-sea cephalopods alive for any real amount of time and I don't think any one has taken a deep-sea octo from mating, to laying eggs, to brooding through to hatching. Also, those octopuses were my first attempt and I didn't know what to feed them (collecting food takes a lot of my time) and had other start up problems. Another problem is that the octopuses need to be kept cold all the time - power failures, chiller breakdowns, pump failures etc. pose challenges that one wouldn't have to deal with (or are much less sever) if one kept warm water cephalopods. (I lost 1/3 of them to a chiller failure last summer). It is hard to know why they die - is it the food, temp, or is pressure a factor? Although a lack of data from wild animals would prevent you making quantitative assessments of differences in behavior at different water pressures, do the lab-reared animals SEEM to be behaving normally? Yes (I think). But 'normal' is different than for tropical species. Mine are much more sluggish - the doorknobs of the octopus world. Their sluggishness may be an adaptation to conserve energy. Dr. James Wood |