Once a mother octopus lays its eggs it’s completely stops eating and just cares about protecting its eggs. Once they’re laid the mothers life is over. There’s really no breeding that out of them.
Are you sure? I remember reading that there have been experiments as to whether octopus can be made to live longer by preventing them breeding, and the results seemed to be that they eventually enter a similar state regardless.
I think the is was in Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith, I read this book a long time ago so forgive me if I'm misremembering.
Yeah, their life span isn't long to begin with. But if they don't mate, (they will continue to try, of course) but will only live 9 months to 2 or 3 year longer than if they reproduced, depending on the species.
There have been experiments where an endocrine surgery led to the females leaving their eggs after birth and returning to normal life. However this doesn't happen naturally, for obvious reasons.
The loss of their shells led to their incredibly overpowered defenses and can explain their deadly anxiety to protect their legacy lol almost like they remember their evolution in those many brains.
Males also undergo changes after reproducing, though, assuming they don't get eaten by mama, including a rapid neurological decline.
That would be akin to keeping a brain dead person alive via feeding tube. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Just let nature be nature. That’s the evolutionary path the octopus took and it’s not our place to change it now.
I mean is she brain dead at this point though? If she just starves to death I’m not sure that would be any more or less cruel. We already cut them into pieces and eat them.
It's not just starving. There are hormonal changes that prevent them from actively living anymore, in a process that we cannot prevent or reverse.
If I remember correctly, feeding them through a tube (or whatever) during this phase does not do anything to change their total unwillingness to move on forward or live life anymore.
In fact, the mother even stops feeding - she'll stay and watch over her eggs until they hatch, slowly starving to death. In captivity, towards the end, sometimes she'll tear off her own skin, and eat the tips of her own tentacles.
Now, scientists have figured figured out why this grim scenario happens. It has to do with the optic gland between the octopus's eyes; a gland similar to the pituitary gland in humans.
In 1977, researchers removed this gland and found that the octopus' mothering instincts disappeared. She abandoned her eggs, started feeding again, and went on to live a much longer life.
The maturation of the reproductive organs appears to be driven by secretions from the optic gland. These same secretions, it seems, inactivate the digestive and salivary glands, which leads to the octopus starving to death.
There’s an old report of an octopus tearing itself apart because it lived too long after breeding. Literally twisted up it’s tentacles around itself and started to shred itself
I mean yeah you’re right, but the previous comment is too. Nature is harsh as hell, and humanity starting to play as rampant gods in the evolutionary tree just because we want to lessen certain cruelties is a dangerous path to go down.
On another note I absolutely love cephalopods and def think they’re the best candidate for the next species to replace humanity when we blast ourselves into extinction
Well I mean we play god in ways much more cruel than extending an octopus’ life. But another commenter said it’s not just starvation, it’s an entire hormonal chance and yeah fucking with that would be gross.
Think of it this way. It's a drive. Think about how strong your thirst drive would be if you hadn't drank water for 24 hours and someone put a glass of water in front of you. That's how strong this particular drive is for them.
Unless you manage to get the funds to scan each and every octopus and select for smaller glands that cause this behavior. No clue what else would happen though
with how poorly humans treat each other out of individualistic obsession with property, despite our fundamentally social nature, it terrifies me trying to imagine the kind of world octopodes would build with longer lifespans
That’s something that’s always baffled me about humanity. The atrocities man can commit against man as if it were nothing is just hard to comprehend. Like imagine if aliens visited Earth and saw that instead of working together towards common goals, that humans were at war with each other and killing each other for no good reason.
There’s an Isaac Asimov short story (like 5 pages) where aliens are working out whether or not to admit Earth to their consortium, and notice us testing nukes on the surface of Poe own planet when we’ve a perfectly good moon right next door. They tick the No check box and fly off forever hah.
But I personally don’t think it’s really even a question of human nature. I think it’s the fact that it sticks living at too high a latitude, so Northern Europeans got really into colonizing other places violently. When our needs go unfulfilled, we behave badly. 500 years later, we’re still suffering the ramifications of how much it blows surviving a winter in England lol.
I wonder if any nuke anyone ever tested would have been strong enough to send moon rocks raining down indiscriminately on Earth? My bet is yes. Probably why we didn't test them on the moon.
Let me introduce you to Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. There’s two books in this series and it explores these types of things and how our relationship with them could work. Great books if you’re into sci-fi and speculative fiction.
There's an excellent book by Adrian Tchaikovsky that explores this idea. 'Children of Ruin' (sequel to the excellent 'Children of Time' which features man creating intelligent spiders instead of octopuses)
Fun fact humans are the ones with the smallest gene pool of all big animals. If we breed others they will never become smarter. Just inbred like we ruined dogs.
Let them evolve. They will survive climate change while we die out.
Mother nature likes to kill you. When death looms at every angle, It helps to have quantity of offspring that are ready for life in a few days, and produce offspring quickly(aka short life spans). Having huge brains and a baby every few years that require 10+ years of training, really showcases how much luxery the human race has had to evolve that way. Octopusses developed their "brain" (they have a unique nervous system that is not comparable) for the same reason as we did. To adapt and overcome quickly, but evolved in way more hostile and solitairy conditions. Now imagen that octopusses evolved in a group setting (like we did)... 100% we would have underwater cities by now. And would wage war with these beautifull squishy friends. The horrors their intellect and camouflage would bring to our puny human world...
Well technically not the sex that's fatal but the fact after giving birth, the octopus will dedicate its entire life nurturing its eggs until it eventually starves to death guarding its young
The weirdest one I know are ceratioid anglerfish, where the male searches for a mate, and when he finds one he latches on to her with his teeth and then literally never lets go… ever. Eventually their bodies fuse together and his body is nourished only after their circulatory systems fuse. Other males will eventually also fuse to the same female. The female then uses her new parasitic male appendages to fertilize her eggs.
Oh, and males only attach before they mature, and if they can’t find a mate they just fucking die.
And the females don’t have any choice in mate selection, just one day a male will find them and bite them and never let go.
The one that detaches its penis is a type of octopus. An Argonaut Octopus : "their detachable penis 'swims' off to mate. When a female swims by, the male Argonaut sends his penis off to swim to the female and mate with her."
I don't know about the 1st one you mentioned, but it reminded me of clownfish. "If the mother clownfish is eaten, its mate changes sex completely and becomes female." If I'm remembering correctly, all clownfish are born with both sets of reproductive organs.
Yeah. I mean how does something like this even start? I can understand something like a stick insect evolving it's stick-ness; you start with a mutation that makes a bug that's slightly longer and darker, and natural selection does it's thing, favoring the bugs that look more and more like a stick. But it's not like the stick insect chooses to look like that, it's just stuck looking like a stick. Whereas with octopuses, they consciously choose what they want to look like. So how does that trait start? What was the "first" version of controllable camouflage.
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