Octopus vulgaris, brooding eggs
I SEE the sleeping babe, nestling the
breastsiphon of its mother;
The sleeping mother and babe—hush’d, I study them long and long.Walt Whitman
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
Awwww. That’s so sweet.
That reminds me. I’ve still not got a quarter way through Leaves of Grass.
Gotta take care o’ that sometime.
Ditto. Awwww.
It still fascinates me to see how such a sophisticated, intelligent, beautiful creature reproduces in a way so similar to the rest of its phylum. So different, and yet so much the same.
PZ,
Please tell me this is a joke. Isn’t that mom and tens of thousands of her “babes”?