A Cautionary Tale of 408 Tentacles

In his posts, Dr. Clifford tried to be clear about the difficulties of octopus ownership: the costs, the lack of sleep and the serious water damage to his home, which required major renovations. “I did not want to perpetuate or romanticize keeping a baby octopus,” he told me.

Despite those efforts, he was overwhelmed with requests to adopt a hatchling.

“If you put it out there, then people will want it,” said Vincent Nijman, an expert on the wildlife trade at Oxford Brookes University who has studied the role that social media plays in the exotic-pet trade. “And if you say, ‘Don’t get it,’ it’s a bit like, ‘Do as I say, don’t do as I do,’ right?”

Life support

Still, Dr. Clifford decided that he couldn’t, in good conscience, send any of the babies to private homes. So he arranged for them to go to reputable aquariums and universities as soon as they were big and strong enough to travel. On April 21, he announced that he had found homes for all of the hatchlings.

The next day, Terrance died. The family buried her in the backyard, beside a cluster of trees whose trunks reminded Cal of octopus tentacles.

Now, they just needed to keep the babies alive until they could be shipped to their new homes. The odds were against them. In the wild, only a tiny fraction survive.

About 20 hatchlings died in the first month alone, Dr. Clifford said. (The causes of death included cannibalism and a temporary loss of power to the water chiller.)

He began to worry about what his enormous, highly invested audience would think if he lost more hatchlings. “The pressure to keep the babies alive was pretty suffocating,” Dr. Clifford said.

A local reptile expert and breeder, whom Dr. Clifford had befriended, became a lifeline, helping to care for and then even house the octopus babies when the Clifford home was being renovated. Despite their joint efforts, hatchlings kept dying.