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Cameron Clifford, a 36-year-old dentist, bought a female octopus for his octopus obsessed son Cal's ninth birthday.
The octopus arrived larger than expected ended up hatching a total of 50 babies.
The family had to arrange 50 separated homes for the unexpected offspring, spend thousands of dollars on clams, crabs, and snails, not to mention the costs to repair the damage to the house from spilled water and a small electrical fire.
The family spent more than $3000 on food supplies and water damage repairs.
Do not get a pet octopus unless you're ready to lose sleep and your kids' college fund simultaneously, he told USAToday, jokingly.
The experience is overall joyful and rewarding as he said: 'It's been an absolutely fun experience, not just for me, but also for my kids.
Absolutely not. Let's leave the wild things in the wild, not the house.
Agreed, I am not a fan of all these pet shops selling all manner of wildlife and invasive species to anyone with a few dollars. Problems often ensue. Florida for example, now has Boa Constrictors, Rock Pythons and Burmese Pythons, Green Iguanas, Nile Monitors, Cane Toads, Lionfish, Vervets, etc breeding in the wild and competing for food and/or killing their native wildlife. They have so far had very little success in trying to control these populations introduced by their residents.
Last edited by OutdoorLover; 04-17-2024 at 02:22 PM..
It would certainly take an expensive fish tank set-up to support an octopus.
They are supposed to be really intelligent so it might be interesting to see if communication could be set up.
They are also delicious so when an octopus enters my house it is to join me for dinner.
I've read a number of stories about their intelligence.
I used to volunteer and compile research data behind the scenes for a marine aquarium that kept one or two smaller octopi in a specially-designed, open-topped display habitat in the visitor center. Most if not all of the aquarium's display animals were native to the surrounding area, not exotic imports. Including the octopus. If you were quiet and gentle, you could coax the current display resident to come investigate your hand. They're quite shy. It was quite a thrill to be checked out by such an amazing creature. I remember "greeting" the octopus during my shifts.
The main problem with that display was that the octopus eventually discovered how easy it was to escape and roam the room...and find the shallow, intertidal surge pool provided for kids to explore starfish and live mollusks such as clams or abalone. Octopus love to eat those. Once the octopus figured things out, no keeping it where it belonged. Every morning we'd come in only to find a wet trail across the floor between the octopus tank and the surge pool as well as the remains of last night's dinner. The "educated" individual had to be released back to the wild and a "novice" found to replace it. Eventually the local population of octopi were all too familiar with the process. The amount of time it took a new tenant to escape from the display dropped because they were actually re-captures! Free dinners and relative safety were worth exchanging for time in human hands.
Last edited by Parnassia; 04-17-2024 at 02:50 PM..
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I just finished reading Remarkably Bright Creatures. I can see how someone would want one. So interesting and smart.
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