The Mother Who Refused to Eat

In 2007, researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute discovered a deep-sea octopus clinging to a rocky ledge nearly a mile beneath the Pacific. They named her and began watching. What they documented over the next four and a half years stunned the scientific world.

This mother octopus — a Graneledone boreopacifica — had attached her eggs to that cold rock face and never left. For fifty-three months, she guarded them. She did not hunt. She did not eat. When curious crabs wandered close, she pushed them away with arms that grew thinner by the month. Researchers watched her body slowly deteriorate, her skin losing color, her eyes clouding. She was starving to death by choice.

When the eggs finally hatched in 2011, the babies drifted into the dark water fully developed and strong. Their mother, spent and hollow, was gone.

Fifty-three months without a single meal — the longest brooding period ever recorded in the animal kingdom — all so her young would have the best chance at life.

There is something written deep into creation that whispers of a love willing to pour itself out completely. "Greater love has no one than this," Jesus said, "than to lay down one's life for one's friends." The God who designed a mother octopus to give everything also sent His Son to do the same — not by instinct, but by choice. Not for fifty-three months, but for eternity. And not so we would merely survive, but so we would truly live.