This short clip from PBS Nature’s Octopus: Making Contact is choc-full of wonderous baby cephalopods. Baby bobtail squid hide under a costume of sand grains that stick to their skin. Baby flamboyant cuttlefish look like a cross between an alien and a tropical flower as they snatch prey with speed. Pyjama Squid have sharp-looking high-contrast stripes. And we get to see them hatch and hunt.
Baby cephalopods are independent as soon as they hatch, and can start flashing their color-changing cells from their eggs. Observe this baby Caribbean Reef Octopus hatching at the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center. Its chromatophores fire swiftly after breaking free of its egg, possibly from the stress of hatching.
ICYMI: Your daily squee has arrived. #octobabies pic.twitter.com/D9e5T5bkun
— Virginia Aquarium (@VAAquarium) February 7, 2018
Related reading: So You Know, This Is How to Incubate Baby Cephalopods in a Soda Bottle.
Related watching: Baby Octopus at the Vancouver Aquarium, Baby Octopus crawling around out of water, and Squid: Coming to Life, captured in microscopic detail.And of course, The Cephalopod Empire in Woods Hole.
This Webby award-winning video collection exists to help teachers, librarians, and families spark kid wonder and curiosity. TKSST features smarter, more meaningful content than what's usually served up by YouTube's algorithms, and amplifies the creators who make that content.
Curated, kid-friendly, independently-published. Support this mission by becoming a sustaining member today.