Parents give up a lot for their children, but they rarely give up their lives. But a female octopus has no choice: the last thing she’ll do is take care of her eggs.
She stops eating and dies of starvation because she wants to be a good person. This happened around the time of the young birth. She could hasten her downfall by tearing off pieces of her claimed body.
The “optic gland” seems to be in charge of coordinating these behaviours, which seem to be caused by feelings of worry. When this organ is removed, an octopus’s life expectancy goes up by a lot, so it’s not a simple case of depletion.
Instead, the passing seems to be changed before it happens. Octopuses have a tendency to eat their own young, so passing may be a way to keep a mother from feeding on her own young.
There are more than 250 known species of octopuses, and most of them are still alive because they had enough time to grow and reproduce. As members of the cephalopod group, which also includes squid and cuttlefish, octopuses are very adaptable and smart.
Male octopuses mate and then die.
The male octopus mates and dies. Octopuses are one of the few animals that die after mating or giving birth. A male octopus will either fertilise a female’s eggs himself or give the female his sperm to keep until her eggs are ready to be fertilised. Before long, the male octopus will die, since this is often the end of his life. The female octopus only lives long enough to give birth to her young, and then she dies right away after her young are born.
How an octopus comes to be
When baby octopuses start to hatch from their eggs, they are already on their own and must find a way to live. In their early stages, when they are called paralarvae, octopuses usually hide in clouds of small fish, where they eat crab and starfish larvae. In any case, they risk being eaten along with the small fish by other hungry sea creatures. If an octopus makes it through the paralarval arrangement, it will always fall deeper into the sea.
Juvenile Development
When the octopus gets to deeper sea levels, it starts to grow quickly.
According to the Everything Octopus site, the teen will gain 5% of its weight every day until it reaches its full size. The octopus can’t do anything until it’s a grown-up. In fact, only a small number of the thousands of babies born during spawning will grow up. As it stands, two or three mammoth Pacific octopus paralarvae will make it to adulthood and reproduce.
Male octopuses do become adults before females do, but they may still be too young to mate. From what researchers have found, it seems that older women tend to date bigger men.
Adulthood and Having Children
Depending on the type of octopus, they usually reach adulthood after about one to two years. The male will try to find different women to mate with. After mating with a female, the male will really die within a few months. So, in the wild, men don’t live as long as women do.
Females carry the fertilised eggs until they are big enough to be released. Usually, they hang from strings around her cave. She can lay as many as 100 thousand eggs. For the next few months, the female protects her eggs from danger and makes sure they get enough oxygen.
During these times, which can last anywhere from 2 to 10 months depending on the type of octopus, the female doesn’t eat and slowly goes away. She usually lives long enough to blow the eggs out of her nest so the paralarvae can get out and join the tiny fish cloud.
Life Ends for Octopus
Different species of octopuses have different lengths of time between giving birth, making more offspring, and dying. Common octopuses, for example, can live as long as if they were two years old, but monster octopuses can live at least three years and up to five years if they don’t mate.
The giant Pacific octopus can live anywhere from three to five years in the wild.
