Dr. Cameron Clifford, a dentist in Edmond, Okla., said his son Cal, 9, has been infatuated with octopuses since he was 3 years old. “Every birthday, every Christmas, every holiday, he would always say: ‘All I want is an octopus,’” Dr. Clifford said.

For a while, the family nurtured Cal’s interest by buying him octopus toys and octopus T-shirts, dressing him as an octopus for Halloween and taking him to aquariums to see live octopuses.

Then, last October, Dr. Clifford sprang for the real deal.

He ordered his son a California two-spot octopus to keep as a pet in a tank in his bedroom. It arrived via UPS in a bag of water packed inside a cardboard box on Oct. 11, Cal’s ninth birthday. Cal named it Terrance.

Image

When the Clifford family welcomed Terrance, they did not realize she was a female octopus, who would give birth to 50 hatchlings. Credit...Michael Noble Jr. for The New York Times

Unbeknown to the family, Terrance was a female, who released what Dr. Clifford described as “a chandelier” of puffy little eggs in December. He assumed the eggs were unfertilized until one night in February, when, while cleaning the tank, he picked one up and examined it closely.