Pet Theory
A Cautionary
Tale of 408 Tentacles
One pet octopus suddenly became more than four dozen. They went viral. Then it all went south.
By Emily Anthes
Emily Anthes is a science reporter who writes Pet Theory, a column about our creature companions.
Once upon a time, there was an octopus-besotted boy named Cal who lived in the landlocked state of Oklahoma. One day, a special package appeared at his house: a small pet octopus, with bright blue eyespots on its head, that Cal named Terrance.
Terrance turned out to be female — and pregnant. One octopus turned into 51, eight tentacles into 408. The boy’s father, Dr. Cameron Clifford, worked day and night to keep the octopuses alive.
Last spring, Dr. Clifford, a dentist, chronicled the family’s efforts on TikTok, and the story soon went what can only be described as megaviral. The TikTok videos racked up millions of views, and then the news media came calling. For a brief period last April, the story seemed to be everywhere: National Public Radio, USA Today, The Associated Press, The Daily Mail, Good Morning America, The Washington Post and, yes, The New York Times.
And then, the TikTok updates stopped abruptly. The media and the public moved on. But periodically, I found myself wondering what had happened next. So I called Dr. Clifford to find out.
“It’s unfortunately not that storybook of an ending,” he told me. “Fairy tales leave out a lot of details.”
Now, a year after the cephalopod squad became famous, what once seemed like a modern fairy tale might be better read as a cautionary one — about the power of social media, the perils of fame and the challenges involved in living with (and loving) creatures that are made for a world far removed from our own.
Cephalopod squad
Anyone who tuned in, even briefly, to the coverage of the Cliffords would have learned that at the heart of the story was a boy’s lifelong love of octopuses and his fervent dream to have one as a pet. It might never have come true if not for social media — and the chance fact that, in 2023, Dr. Clifford was between jobs and at loose ends.
It was then that he happened upon a specialty aquarium store and learned that, contrary to what he had long told his son, it was possible to get a pet octopus in Oklahoma. At dinner that evening, Dr. Clifford told Cal that although he was not making any promises, a pet octopus was, theoretically, attainable. Cal was so overcome that he began to cry. “I never knew that could happen,” he sobbed.
Dr. Clifford found his son’s reaction so endearing that he recorded it and shared it with the friends and family members who followed his private Instagram account. The response was nearly unanimous: It wasn’t fair to dangle the possibility of a pet octopus in front of Cal without getting him one.
Dr. Clifford documented each development on his private account. He shared videos of his weeks of preparation, Terrance’s arrival just in time for Cal’s ninth birthday and the discovery that Terrance had released a tiny cloud of eggs.
Cal, who knew his octopus biology, was devastated; in most species, females lay eggs just once and die shortly thereafter. Everything the Cliffords had learned about octopuses suggested that the eggs probably weren’t fertilized, which meant that Terrance would spend the rest of her short life protecting eggs that would never hatch.
But the eggs did hatch, and the Cliffords, who had never had a pet before, now had 51. It was a varsity-level care-taking challenge. Dr. Clifford’s Instagram audience followed along as he figured out how to house and feed the hatchlings, which required a regular supply of live prey such as baby shrimp, shipped from the coasts at a cost of several hundred dollars a week.
“Everyone loved it, and everyone was asking me about it,” he said. Eventually, Dr. Clifford’s wife suggested that he take the story to a wider audience and set up a public account on TikTok.
Instant fame
From the outside, Terrance and her 51 babies seemed born for TikTok, and Dr. Clifford came across as a natural, leaning hard into self-deprecating humor, dad jokes and bad puns. (At one point he described the family as “CLAMifesting our cephaloBUD into existence.”)
In reality, he had been hesitant to venture onto the platform, in part because he considered himself a private person. His first post — a short, contextless clip of Terrance in her tank — bombed, and commenters criticized him for keeping an octopus in captivity.
Octopuses are complex and intelligent as well as fragile and sensitive. They are also difficult to maintain and breed in captivity, which is why many pet octopuses, including Terrance, began their lives in the wild.
“Just because it’s in a tank and you can make some sort of facsimile of its native environment doesn’t mean that you’re keeping it in its fully natural environment,” said Kelley Voss, a marine biologist who has studied several octopus species in the wild and captivity. “I think aquariums are super valuable, but just having it as a pet at your house — that’s kind of going to be a fool-around-and-find-out situation, I fear.”
Dr. Clifford understood these concerns, but he didn’t view owning an octopus as a serious ethical breach, especially given that the animals are often eaten. “I eat meat, and so to say, like, ‘No, you should not keep an octopus as a pet,’ while I chow down on a bacon cheeseburger. …,” he said, trailing off.
But he found that he did care what internet strangers thought. So he decided to show people how much his son loved octopuses and how seriously the family was taking this responsibility.
Dr. Clifford began posting a few videos a day, walking viewers through the story from the beginning. This time, the account took off. “The TikTok community rallies behind feel-good stories,” Dr. Clifford said. The media followed.
In some ways the sudden fame was fun, Dr. Clifford said, and it had some immediate benefits. Before TikTok, he had been searching desperately, and mostly in vain, for expert help with the hatchlings. Now he had octopus experts and experienced caregivers reaching out to provide support.
“I always love when octopuses are in the media and people are really willing and wanting to learn more about them,” said Meg Mindlin, a graduate student at Walla Walla University in Washington State who studies octopuses in the lab and began talking regularly with Dr. Clifford.
Ms. Mindlin, who uses her TikTok account, @invertebabe, for science education, saw Terrance as an opportunity to teach the public about the biology of octopuses and the challenges of keeping them in captivity. “It was a really fun time on the internet,” she said.
But the attention could also be overwhelming. Some news outlets were intrusive; Dr. Clifford found one TV cameraman wandering around the house unsupervised, shooting footage of family photos.
He also began hearing from online followers who wanted to help fund the hatchlings’ care. The offers were well-meaning, Dr. Clifford said, but they made him uncomfortable. There were so many worthier causes in the world, he told me, and he didn’t want to create the impression that the octopus babies would suffer if people didn’t donate.
“I didn’t want there to be this assumption of like, ‘Oh, man, this octopus is only going to have a great life if you hit that subscribe button,’ or whatever it is,” he said. “I wanted people to know: I did this out of my own responsibility, out of my own pocket. I’m perfectly capable of following it through.”
But as the offers kept coming and the expenses piled up, he relented, very briefly accepting some donations via Venmo before pivoting to selling custom T-shirts. (Some of his most popular TikTok videos also ended up bringing in money, he said.)
In his posts, Dr. Clifford tried to be clear about the difficulties of octopus ownership: the costs, the lack of sleep and the serious water damage to his home, which required major renovations. “I did not want to perpetuate or romanticize keeping a baby octopus,” he told me.
Despite those efforts, he was overwhelmed with requests to adopt a hatchling.
“If you put it out there, then people will want it,” said Vincent Nijman, an expert on the wildlife trade at Oxford Brookes University who has studied the role that social media plays in the exotic-pet trade. “And if you say, ‘Don’t get it,’ it’s a bit like, ‘Do as I say, don’t do as I do,’ right?”
Life support
Still, Dr. Clifford decided that he couldn’t, in good conscience, send any of the babies to private homes. So he arranged for them to go to reputable aquariums and universities as soon as they were big and strong enough to travel. On April 21, he announced that he had found homes for all of the hatchlings.
The next day, Terrance died. The family buried her in the backyard, beside a cluster of trees whose trunks reminded Cal of octopus tentacles.
Now, they just needed to keep the babies alive until they could be shipped to their new homes. The odds were against them. In the wild, only a tiny fraction survive.
About 20 hatchlings died in the first month alone, Dr. Clifford said. (The causes of death included cannibalism and a temporary loss of power to the water chiller.)
He began to worry about what his enormous, highly invested audience would think if he lost more hatchlings. “The pressure to keep the babies alive was pretty suffocating,” Dr. Clifford said.
A local reptile expert and breeder, whom Dr. Clifford had befriended, became a lifeline, helping to care for and then even house the octopus babies when the Clifford home was being renovated. Despite their joint efforts, hatchlings kept dying.
By early August, just five hatchlings were still alive. And then they stopped eating. “We started throwing everything at them,” Dr. Clifford said. “A snail, a crab, frozen shrimp, live shrimp, brine shrimp.” Nothing worked, and by the end of the month, the last hatchling had died.
“It was remarkable how long he was able to keep them going,” said David Scheel, a marine biologist at Alaska Pacific University who became a sounding board for Dr. Clifford. “For the months that they were around, he just put an immense amount of his life into these guys.”
Cal had already grieved for Terrance twice — when she first released her eggs, which told him her days were numbered, and after her death in April. Now Dr. Clifford had “to make my son cry three times about something he cares so much about.” He described the entire experience as a “painfully unorthodox tragedy.”
Dr. Clifford couldn’t figure out how to tell his followers. “It’s kind of hard to make a funny video about that,” he said. “Like, ‘Yeah, they died. This is the end of the content.’” He was burned out on social media and worried about disappointing people. He didn’t want to answer any more questions. Ultimately, he simply deleted TikTok from his phone and left the story unfinished.
“I mean, what do you think?” Dr. Clifford asked me. “How would you have finished it?”
He was finishing it now, I said. What did he want people to know?
He paused and then said that he wanted to thank his followers for their support and tell them that he had given these octopuses his all. “I think the obvious lesson is that they’re not good pets,” he said. “They’re not durable pets, they’re not cheap pets, they’re not easy pets. And they are extremely remarkable, and they have personalities, and they’re smart.”
He hopes to return to TikTok at some point and finish the story there. But for now, he was taking a break from both social media and pet ownership. “Maybe a hamster in the future,” he said. “But I think we’ve hit our family pet quota for a lifetime.”
Emily Anthes is a science reporter, writing primarily about animal health and science. She also covered the coronavirus pandemic.
The post A Cautionary Tale of 408 Tentacles appeared first on New York Times.
