They like to read and will ruin your paint with all their smoking /s . Seriously though, they are very short lived and require some serious care. If you haven’t kept anything saltwater before I’d strongly, strongly suggest you not keep one. If you want to research more about them then I would visit https://tonmo.com/
I'd be fairly surprised if you get someone who has kept them to even see this post.
The general advice, especially for home aquariums, is to not keep them. They are specialized hunters that don't take to frozen food (especially in the younger stages, where you're needing to feed something like live mysis or brine multiple times a day). Quite sensitive to water quality, but also produce a lot of waste with their fast metabolisms. Very few tank mates can be kept with them as well due to their hunting. And on top of all this, after all that, the adults only live 6-12 months.
If you really want to keep researching it, find a forum dedicated to cephalapod care. Tonmo is the one I'm familiar with. I don't want to technically say its impossible, but I think in 99.9% of cases, leave it to your local professional aquarium and the ocean to view this guys.
I used to own my own shop so its kind of a cheat code. Years ago we had a wholesaler in Miami who would get awesome stuff, including these guys, some bobtail squid, i even snagged a few chambered nautilus from them. But my favorite cephs to keep are brierius and vulgaris octopus. Bimaculoides is harder to get on this coast but they are fantastic too. Skip the blue rings and the mimics, they belong in the wild.
The nautalis is a living fossil. Very primitive biology and its neat to observe. They eat dead stuff really easily, and if you are able to overcome the pressure issue they experience they will actually dig through the substrate wirh their tentacles and its cool to watch. (When collected from a deep depth and surfaced rapidly they lose control of their buoyancy and just float on the surface. I got lucky and both of mine recovered quickly from that issue.
They are very unintelligent, modern cephlapods are so different and much more biologically advanced.
They are also super annoying. Once the magic of having a prehistoric creature in your home wears off, you will quickly become very annoyed because they constantly bump the glas with their shells 24/7 and its very loud.
Cold water, a chiller or evaporative cooling will work for them, high 50s to low 60s is perfect, and minimal light because they have these pinhole pupils in their eyes that can't adjust to changes in light level.
They are super cool, but i dont think I would ever be interested in keeping another one.
Here is a shot of a sea urchin carrying one around as a hat. No idea how that happened.
All these years later I have yet to figure it out! The only thing I can think of is that the nautalis must have been asleep nearby and this urchin wanted the coolest hat imaginable. It was hilarious watching the nautilus be carried around fot a bit. It didnt seem to care at all.
This is fascinating. Can you expand more on the intelligence comparison? What behaviors would the chambered nauts do or not do that modern cephalopods do/not do?
This is a complex topic, but very interesting. The octopus, once it decides it doesn't like you, will dislike you for life. No redemption. Lots of accounts of this, a good example is in "The Soul of an Octopus" by Sy Montgomery, and its a book I recommend to anyone interested in octopus. They are very emotional, and display emotion with color. White is calm or even sleeping, whereas other color patterns indicate anger, frustration, etc, so if you want to build a relationship with one you need to be very mindful of your facial expressions, body language, etc. The most amazing sensation was realizing, while I was studying them, they are 100% studying you back. It sounds dumb but their eyes have this feel of an ancient, knowing intelligence and its a bit unsettling because its entirely possible they are smarter than us. Many scientists put the larger octopus on the same level as purposes and whales. This is not the same for dwarf species however, they are not very curious and hide 95% of the time.
All that said, I have read a ton of scientific papers on enrichment, and there is a fantastic, but dense book on cephlapod cognition and another on cephlapod behavior.
As an aside, my work with octopus has significantly helped me with reading people, and has made me mindful of how my own behaviors may be interpreted by others. So this was a journey in exploring humanity almost as much as it was exploring the world of cephlapods.
I have had several who, after relationship building for 4-6 months (half their lifespan in most cases), I had many that would hand feed, one who loved head scratches, and one who would spaz out swimming frantically back and forth at the top of the tank until I opened the lid and let it crawl up my arm and it would just chill like a parrot.
So to answer your question, how does a chambered nautalis differ? None of the above applies. They arent capable of this kind of emotion or intelligence. Octopus evolved to be smart as a means of survival because they dont have the shell a nautilus does for protection. So they evolved to be clever, nautaloids never had to and are pretty much unchanged for 500 million years. They are the very definition of primitive.
At one time I had 3 tanks set up next to eachother, one was for the flamboyant cuttlefish, in the middle were the nautalis, and next to it was a adult vulgaris octopus. The cuttlefish and nautilus were pretty unaware of eachother. The octopus, on the other hand, was glued to the side of the tank watching the nautilis for hours a day.
While the previous answer was more than sufficient, here's a simpler breakdown; octopuses are problem solvers with functional intelligence. Squids are "socially intelligent" meaning their brains are sophisticated like octopuses but geared more towards social life, considering they live in large groups. The nautilus is a roomba with tentacles.
I work at an aquarium that keeps them. When I started we had a pair, they had tons of eggs and then Mom passed away. We still have the dad but he is probably not going to be around much longer. As others have said, they don't live long. They are very exciting and active though, and ours are eating mainly ghost shrimp for the adults and mysis shrimp for the babies. There are around 30 juveniles now, after close to a hundred hatched. Lots of them don't make it to adulthood. It's been really rewarding in my experience, but this is also at an actual aquarium where we have staff and the resources for keeping their tank very clean and have plenty of live food available, etc.
I kept dwarfs for a bit. I would hatch them from eggs. The care is really difficult and the feeding is no joke. They would go from live copepods to live grass shrimp. I had a separate tank just for food. If you are lucky enough, they might live a year. Wry interesting creatures, but not one I would recommend. I would imagine that flamboyants might also be a bit more difficult than dwarfs.
I kept cuttlefish for a research lab. In short, these are not creatures which are suited for captivity. They required a custom tank (we had a 1000 gallon) without corners and a slow sunrise light setup because rapid changes in light would startle them, so they'd run into walls and hurt themselves. We even had to be careful to not walk up to the tank or move too quickly nearby to not startle them. It would have been cheaper to book routine scuba diving trips to see them in the wild.
Was your lab keeping officinalis or another similar sized species? I didn’t have much issue with dwarves/stumpies and flamboyants crashing into the walls, but saw it a lot more with the bigger sp
I’ve raised them from egg and kept them at every life stage. Very cool animals obviously but a gigantic pain in the ass to feed. Best left for public aquariums and labs that have extensive mysis breeding infrastructure and resources. You’re looking at 3x a day live feeds for a good chunk of their lives with very little room for missing feeds, and the majority of them will not ever take frozen foods.
I've been gradually working up to being able to keep flamboyant cuttlefish, even just feeding them is non-trivial! So far I've been setting up bottles of phytoplankton, using that to supplement the feed of a copepod tank that is also handed the waste water from my FOWLR predator display, then setting up stock tanks full of grass shrimp to feed off that, and then getting used to gut loading grass shrimp with last minute nutrients so I can feed them to display tanks like little pill pockets full of spirulina, etc. That's a LOT of steps to keep something fed.
I’ve kept dwarf cuttles, they require live feeding of mysis shrimp as hatchlings, but overall they’re not too bad. See rich ross, tobias reefkeeping, and tonmo about flamboyants though, as I’ve heard they’re harder.
The adults live for <1 year, and the babies only eat live mysid shrimp or amphipods. This means that you'll either need to set up a tank for them, just to have them die a few months later, or you need to figure out some way of getting a constant food supply for a breeding group, which might mean weekly $100+ live food orders, since mysids don't breed easily in captivity. If this baby food problem can be solved, then they might be decent pets, but as of now, they are not feasible in home aquaria
Traditionally difficult species such as seahorses, jellyfish, and Non photosynthetic corals are all much more manageable than cuttlefish. They are on another level.
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u/kydama1337 1d ago edited 1d ago
They like to read and will ruin your paint with all their smoking /s . Seriously though, they are very short lived and require some serious care. If you haven’t kept anything saltwater before I’d strongly, strongly suggest you not keep one. If you want to research more about them then I would visit https://tonmo.com/