We often get animals that are caught as bycatch from a trawl or in a prawn trap.
. Their common name is North Pacific bigeye octopus. They have these really big eyes! They’ve been found everywhere from off the coast of California, to British Columbia, to the Gulf of Alaska, from about 100 meters to 1,000 meters deep. They were discovered over a century ago. But because animals like these are from the deep sea, and they’re difficult to observe, we didn’t know much about their lifespan and how long development takes.After a month of keeping her in the tank, she laid eggs.
Four months later, I noticed the little red eye spots in the eggs. They weren’t fertilized all along, so she must have mated in the wild and stored the sperm, which cephalopods are known to do. She stored it for up to a month, and then used it to fertilize the eggs. It took 10 months total for all of the eggs to hatch. We’ve never had a case of fertilized eggs. And in fact, it’s never happened in captivity for this species.The mother was doing much of the hard work to care for the eggs. She was blowing water over the eggs to clean them, and also cleaning them off with her suckers, to get rid of debris and prevent bacteria overgrowth.Before she laid eggs, I was able to interact with her more, and even hold her.
Without the mother there, we had to take over cleaning the eggs. And so we increased the water flow and the airflow to help agitate the eggs. Sometimes, I would spray water on the eggs. We also installed a webcam pointing at the eggs so that we could monitor them remotely.We didn’t know when they would hatch. And we had no guidelines for how long it would take. So I was checking on them in person and remotely through the webcam.
The eggs hatched over a period of two and a half months. Some hatched early; they were premature and didn’t make it. We lost quite a few. Some of this is natural: They say that in the wild, only 1 percent of octopus babies will make it to adulthood, which could possibly be because of genetic fitness. That might be why they lay so many eggs.
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