Today is a video day since the news is the depressing same-old-same old. Instead, I found this amazing three-minute video of a deep-sea (“benthic”) octopus, Graneledone boreopacifica, who brooded her eggs for more than FOUR YEARS (to be precise, 53 months). That is by far the record for any animal, as the video says. (The previous record for any animal was 14 months.) Octopuses are smart, and I wonder if she got bored sitting in the same spot for all that time.
Do realize that she almost certainly had nothing to eat over that period.
As far as I know, this guarding/brooding behavior is known in all octopuses that have been studied, and the sad part is that after the babies hatch, the mother simply withers and dies. This means that females reproduce only once.
h/t: Matthew
Four years, huh? Somehow this must be related to the election.
I KID I KID!
Seriously I never heard of fertilized eggs being incubated more than some number of months, not years. Quite a phenomenon – especially mom’s role, very sad.
Thanks for this one. I’ll chill now; you’ve had enough of me.
I know how you feel about podcasts, but the Radiolab episode about this octopus is pretty amazing: https://radiolab.org/podcast/octomom
Thank you. I will listen. The video was fine!
I learned about this somewhere, but love the video! My first thought is that brooding for four years is a risky way to produce offspring. I suppose that the cold—and associated slowdown of chemical reactions—requires longer incubation periods, but it also would seem that long-term success of this strategy requires a highly stable and predictable environment. You can’t tolerate four years worth of erratic currents, undersea avalanches, curious humans, or other disturbances and still end expect to produce viable offspring that themselves make it to maturity. Some of the amazing trade-offs of natural selection!
I agree it seems especially risky (and amazing that this evolved) because it’s her one shot. So I guess it must not be all that risky, maybe for the reasons you noted (few disturbances or predators).
Amazing and moving. Especially the husks of both mom and babies.
If I died after giving birth, I’d want a long gestation period, too.
Seriously, what could be the evolutionary advantage of having only one brood?
Semelparity, as it’s called in animals (monocarpy in plants) has evolved many times.
Ideas about the evolutionary advantages are many; g**gle ‘evolution of semelparity’.
Thanks Chas – I did.
Fascinating. The evolutionary biology at WEIT is top notch.
best and keep posting
D.A.
NYC
Thanks from me, too.
A women has maybe 12 kids before she dies. The octopus has 56,000+ babies before she dies. Both are likely to have grandkids.
If a human female dies during her first pregnancy, the fact that she could have gotten pregnant 11 more times, had she not died, is no more useful to her genes than the octopus who dies before delivering 56,000. But the one that survives hits the jackpot.
And if the octopus’s body is consumed in the gestation of all those eggs, it could not be otherwise.
I think you meant “benthic” (my wife is a benthic ecotoxicologist so I get to hear all about those words lol)
Yep, a typo. I have fixed it, thanks.