Sepia officinalis

Cuttlefish in captivity: An investigation into housing and husbandry for improving welfare

“…Although juvenile cuttlefish are solitary in the wild (Hanlon and Messenger, 1988) and are frequently found alone in public aquaria (Cooke personal observation), they are often stocked in high densities in aquaculture and research facilities (Sykes et al, 2011(Sykes et al, , 2012(Sykes et al, , 2014. Therefore, as this study focused mainly on the reaction of individually housed cuttlefish to different environmental conditions and stimuli, we suggest that further work is needed to test how our suggestions for environmental enrichment and husbandry practices influence the frequency of negative behaviour and damaging behaviour in animals living in groups in larger systems.…”

Investigating the essential fatty acids in the common cuttlefish Sepia officinalis (Mollusca, Cephalopoda): Molecular cloning and functional characterisation of fatty acyl desaturase and elongase

“…For instance, it is possible to produce 50 g individuals with great commercial interest within 45-60 days. Despite the above, Sykes et al (2014) highlighted some major bottlenecks hindering the transition from experimental to industrial scale culture, including lack of control of reproduction in captivity, as well as nutritional issues related to the dependence on live prey in early developmental stages, and also lack of an adequate pelleted diet for grow-out stages.…”

Enzymatic capacities of metabolic fuel use in cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) and responses to food deprivation: insight into the metabolic organization and starvation survival strategy of cephalopods

“…Profiles of maximal activities of metabolic enzymes provide a robust indicator of metabolic capacities and fuel preferences among animals (Newsholme and Crabtree 1986;Suarez 2012). Cuttlefish and certain other cephalopods are important food species whose nutrition and starvation responses are particularly relevant given the increasing interest in their culture (Navarro et al 2014;Sykes et al 2014). To clarify the paradox of lipid mobilization during starvation in cephalopods, we measured the enzymatic capacities of cuttlefish tissues to use fatty acids and ketone bodies as metabolic fuels and examined for the first time whether these capacities are modulated by starvation.…”