9-year-old Cal Clifford had been begging his parents for years: "please get me a pet octopus, please!" Eventually, his parents acquiesced to his demands, and brought him a cute little cephalopod named Terrance.
But, as The Washington Post reports:
Terrance was not a male octopus, as they had first thought. Her new tank in Cal Clifford's bedroom was filled with dozens of eggs.
But that was only the first twist in a saga playing out in Edmond, Okla., that captivated thousands of people on social media. The biggest surprise, Clifford said, actually came one night in February, when he picked up one of the eggs — which he had long assumed weren't fertilized — and accidentally popped it. What he thought was a "blob of some strange liquid" came out and fell back into the tank.
Seconds later, that blob started swimming. It was a tiny version of Terrance.
[…]
Over the next week, the Cliffords tried to catch the hatchlings. Suddenly, the family was tending to 50 baby California two-spot octopuses — also known as bimacs.
Sure, it's not easy raising a family of 51 sentient cephalopods. But hey, at least it turned the family into temporary TikTok stars!
(Seriously though — no one should be caging an octopus to keep it as a pet, let alone 51 of them)
They got their son a pet octopus. Weeks later, there were 50 more. [María Luisa Paúl / Washington Post]
That said: Ingenious maker builds underwater maze to entertain his brilliant octopus (video)
