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Comment by hagbard_c | Hacker News Reader

They only live for 3 years or so, just eat them when they're close to kicking the bucket.

This short lifetime combined with their intelligence does raise the question how far an octopus could get if it were able to reach our age. Would they continue learning and adapting, leading to a race of superintelligent molluscs or would they plateau in their first year and just coast along?

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Typically octopuses produce offspring only near the end of their life, so eating them at any point is destructive for their reproduction and species health.

Eat them after they reproduced then, they only do that once in their life.

They typically die after reproducing. Mothers use their remaining energy to help their offspring survive, fathers sometimes do but not all - if you could somehow capture only post-mating male octopuses from species that don't sacrifice themselves for their offspring then sure, but that seems like an unrealistic expectation.

So is growing billions of genetic clones of that one perfect fruit, but you know...

I suspect that would not be good eat'n. Female ocotopuses that have laid their eggs start to fall apart - you can see the skin peeling off of them. The females stay with the eggs until about when they're ready to hatch and then they just sort of go to pieces. The males, I suspect, suffer a similar fate after they've mated.

except the mother has to care for her eggs until they hatch. So I guess we'd be fine only eating the males...

Anyone who likes the sound of that should check out Adrian Tchaikovksy's Children of Time trilogy, particularly the second one.

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