RICHARD ROSS: This animal is this cephalopod lover's dream
animal.
It's octopus chierchia, or the lesser Pacific striped octopus.
This guy is small, about the size of a quarter.
You find these little octopus in the Pacific coast
of Central America, in the intertidal zone.
So shallow water, just off the beach.
What makes this octopus so striking
is it's got these kind of black and white,
or black and cream stripes.
It's got chromatophores in it's skin,
and it doesn't get different colors really,
but it will change the density of the stripes.
It's just kind of gorgeous.
I don't know any other way to describe it,
except when I look at it, I'm very happy.
This is my secret home lab.
This is where the magic happens.
All this is now fish or fish breeding.
And I grow some coral in here now.
And I got this rack specifically with the idea
of breeding octopuses in mind.
That's the larger Pacific striped octopus.
I am studying this animal because I love this animal.
This animal is one of the ones when I first
started getting into cephalopods that I thought
I would never, ever see alive.
And I've got six of them over there right now, two females
and four males.
Telling the sex of cephalopods can be really difficult.
Lesser Pacific striped octopus is actually very easy
to tell if it's a male or female.
On the ends of their arms, the female has just suckers.
But the male has this little kind of fuzzy papillae.
And once you're able to spot the difference,
they're actually very easy to sex,
which makes your life as a cephalopod escort service,
I guess, it makes it very easy.
And it's on.
When you're an octopus, having your lover
eat you is always a possibility.
Generally, how these guys mate is with the male
as far away from the female as possible.
The male octopus has a modified arm,
called the hectocotylus arm, and that actually
goes inside the mantle.
It's more complicated than that.
His arm, just behind these bunches of arms,
one arm is inside of her mantle cavity.
The penis delivers the sperm down the arm
through peristalsis, like when you swallow,
the groove in the arm kind of squeezes in and out,
pushes the sperm packet forward.
And then that gets to the thing on the tip
of the hectocotylus arm called the lingula.
And the lingula is what the octopus actually
uses to place the sperm packet.
Ooh, spermatophores, wow.
Did I mention octopuses are amazing and cool?
They really are.
There we go.
Nice exit.
How long before the female lays an egg clutch?
That's a hard question to answer.
One of the things I'm hoping to find out when I have completely
closed the lifecycle is being able to answer that question.
We know it's iteroparous, meaning
it has multiple clutches of eggs,
so it's not just one bunch of eggs and then they die,
like other octopuses do.
They keep on going.
Which is a big deal.
Almost no other octopuses do that.
It's got large eggs.
And in cephalopods, large eggs means big babies.
And big babies generally means not a larval phase.
There's not that many octopuses that hatch out as mini-adults.
These octopuses live for about a year to a year and a half.
I'm not saddened by their short lives.
If you've been doing this for 10 or 15 years like I have,
you get used to that as a fact of life.
It's actually kind of beautiful, because it's our life,
but just compressed down into a year.
I think cephalopods in general are the coolest animals
in the world.
And I've got them in my house.
And I'm doing useful work with them.
What more could you ask?