Octopus Cares For Her Eggs For 53 Months, Then Dies

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When the eggs hatch, she dies, starving and exhausted. As biologist Jim Cosgrove says, “No mother could give more”. You can watch a giant Pacific octopus going through this surprisingly moving sacrifice in the clip below from the BBC’s wonderful series Life.

Biologists rarely get a chance to measure how long these brooding periods last; at Monterey Bay, Robison’s team had a rare opportunity. For four and a half years, they returned to the same spot and found the same octopus, “clinging to the vertical rock face, arms curled, covering her eggs”.

She never left, and it’s possible that she didn’t eat for the whole time. Tasty crabs and shrimps crawled around her and she merely nudged them aside if they got too close. The team offered pieces of crab to her using a robot arm on their submersible; she turned them down. She may have occasionally grabbed nearby food or even eaten some of her own eggs, but the team found no evidence of this.

As the years went by, her condition deteriorated. When the team first saw her, her skin was textured and purple, but it soon turned pale, ghostly, and slack. Her eyes became cloudy. She shrank. And all the while, her eggs grew bigger, suggesting that they were indeed the same clutch.

The female octopus brooding her eggs in April 2007 (a), May 2007 (b), May 2009 (c), October 2009 (d), December 2010 (e) and September 2011 (f). The black circle and white arrows show distinctive scars on her arms. Image copyright Robison et al, 2014. MBARI. CC BY 3.0
The female octopus brooding her eggs in April 2007 (a), May 2007 (b), May 2009 (c), October 2009 (d), December 2010 (e) and September 2011 (f). The black circle and white arrows show distinctive scars on her arms. Image copyright Robison et al, 2014. MBARI. CC BY 3.0

The team last saw her in September 2011. When they returned in October, she was gone. Her eggs had hatched and the babies within had swum off to parts unknown, leaving nothing but tattered and empty capsules still attached to the rock. Her body was nowhere to be seen.

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