Take it away, Slog tipper John:

A giant pacific octopus mother who lived just across from downtown Seattle had her hatch right under the noses of local divers. Her den was sequestered in Cove Two in West Seattle, in a location that spared her from predators and over-visitation by humans. On September 4 (aka early, early on September 5), 2010, the eggs began hatching. It’s a time of mixed emotion; joy at the hatch, and sadness at the knowledge that this event means the mother’s life will end. The hatch lasted a full week, after which the mother died.

Octopuses die after they have sex—the male first (his job is done) and the female after the hatch is born and cared for. Here’s how a local octopus expert, Dr. Roland Anderson, explained it to The Stranger a few years ago:

Then the bad times come. “It’s called senescence,” says Dr. Anderson. “And it’s similar to human dementia. Males go crazy, stop eating, rove around aimlessly, not being careful. It’s hormones—females go into senescence, too. My father had Alzheimer’s, and I’m sorry to say he wandered off a time or two and it didn’t make a lot of sense what he was wandering off for. Octopuses are the same way.” Unlike humans with dementia, senescent octopuses sometimes chew off their own arms.

Their immune systems also shut down, allowing the small lacerations they accumulate from bumping into things during senescence to develop major infections. The postcoital male goes directly to feeding the top of the local food chain (seals and sharks) and the bottom (Aeromonas, Vibrio, and Staphylococcus bacteria). The female retires to her cave, decorating it with garlands of tear-shaped eggs. She tends to the strands, blowing them with soft jets of oxygenated water for six months. To keep up her energy, the female metabolizes her own body, losing up to 70 percent of her weight. Soon after her eggs hatch, she dies. As Dr. Anderson repeated several times during our conversations: “There’s no such thing as safe sex for octopuses.”

And as a guide at the Seattle Aquarium said in the same article: “Until they’re full grown, octopuses are the cupcakes of the sea—everybody likes to eat them.” Good luck, little octopuses!

Brend an Kiley has worked as a child actor in New Orleans, as a member of the junior press corps at the 1988 Republican National Convention, and, for one happy April, as a bootlegger’s assistant in Nicaragua....

21 replies on “A Hatch of Baby Giant Pacific Octopuses Just off Downtown Seattle”

  3. The oxymoronic counterpoint to “jumbo shrimp,” I suppose.

    This always seemed poignant and strangely human to me. Octopuses are sentient; perhaps they will discover, as we have, how to live meaningful lives distinct from mere reproduction.

  4. I don’t imagine they have left any fossil impressions because of their soft bodies but their beaks are hard. I wonder if we have any ideas about their evolution and origins.

  5. In a related note, I’ve noticed that (whole) baby octopus “salads” are sold in the sushi section of the QFC on Pike & Broadway.

  8. @7: Hey, if YOU were a cupcake of the sea who’d spent a lifetime staring at your delicious arms, wouldn’t you be at least tempted?

  9. @6, I would indeed!—if some born-that-way subset of Enteroctopus dofleini decided it wanted to move in that direction. The capacity for change appears in a species before the behavioral and social forces that interact with it and drive evolution.

    *:D *:D *:D *:D *:D *:D *:D *:D *:D *:D *:D *:D *:D *:D *:D *:D *:D *:D *:D *:D *:D *:D *:D *:D *:D *:D *:D *:D *:D *:D

  10. It seems somehow unjust to me that something as smart as an octopus should die so readily and routinely as part of its reproductive cycle, but nature don’t give a shit ’bout no justice, so.

  11. What in the world makes you think octopuses (octopi? octopods?) are so fucking smart (not to mention “sentient”)? Do they have a written language? Or even a spoken one? Can they count to 10? Do they build things?

    Seems like there’s a lot of overly romanticized wishful thinking going on here without a lot to back it up.

  15. @11 Well, no, they don’t write or build or juggle or listen to music or anything, but I never said that was the standard for “smart.”

    12 and 13 give an idea of the kind of things I’m thinking of. An octopus is considerably more aware of, and capable of manipulating their environments than lots of creatures, especially in the sea, where the standard modus operandi seems to be “swim around mouth first and hope something edible gets caught inside.”

    What strikes me as perverse is that a creature with a relatively high awareness and manipulative ability- and, therefore, what strikes me as an increased fitness to survive the varied threats of life undersea- should in turn be regularly undone by an internal, biological time bomb that goes off shortly after fulfilling a very basic function, one that many animals pull off routinely without a problem. For all its advances, the octopus has what is basically a self-destruct switch.

    So, that’s weird. Nature’s weird like that. That evolution would produce such a situation is remarkable. That’s all.

  16. @14, as always I appreciate your crusty, cranky skepticism. Granted, “sentience” is a squishy term, though the linked Wikipedia article (despite the dreaded “disputed neutrality” caveat) is a pretty good overview of the points of debate. Your criteria are unnecessarily anthropocentric–ants and termites, among other critters we would not generally credit as sentient, build quite remarkable things, and humans just before the development of written and spoken language were not demonstrably different from us.

    MiO’s links are great. You can also google “octopus intelligence” for a whole lot more.

  20. I remember a class in population genetics where it came out that being immortal counts no more than producing one more child that lives to reproduce (when parents don’t teach their children how to survive better anyway). So the species ( or genes if you like Dawkins) has no advantage in keeping oldsters around as opposed to producing and protecting a few more children.

    I find that somewhat disturbing given the trends in education of late.

  21. @5 – the “baby” octopuses in Japanese and other Asian cuisines are actually full-grown adults; of a species other than the Pacific Giant Octopus, of course.

    Also, this video is one of the few things that’s made me happy in the past few weeks.

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