All Things Ocean

Thursday, February 13, 2014

Friday, January 24, 2014

Octopodes string their soft, translucent eggs up on overhangs of rock or coral. The females lay hundreds of thousands of eggs at a time and will stay to guard them against hungry predators until they hatch. This often takes so long that she begins to starve and some octopuses will eat their own arms to survive. Once her thousands of tiny offspring are hatched, they feed on microscopic organisms like plankton until they grow large enough to live on the sea floor as adults. The mother, often disabled, will generally be eaten by a predator once she leaves her lair because she has grown too weak to defend herself.

Mermaid's Purse

Most sharks and skates lay strangely shaped eggs sometimes called a ‘mermaid’s purse.’ These consist of an egg case in a thin capsule made of collagen. They often are square or rectangular with stringy or pointy corner horns, but can come in a variety of odd shapes. A few sharks, such as the Port Jackson shark, have helical egg cases which are secured into the sand like drill bits. Shark eggs can wash up on the beach and are often hand-sized, although the largest recorded was over 2m long. Female sharks lay fertilized eggs onto the sea floor where they stay until they hatch, not needing any more attention from their mother. Some shark eggs contain several baby sharks which cannibalize each other before hatching to ensure that only the strongest baby survives.