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Octopuses are doomed to be orphans from a very young age. After a female octopus lays her eggs, she stops eating and begins self-mutilating, tearing off her skin and biting off the tips of her tentacles.

By the time a young octopus wriggles out of its egg, its mother is already dead. A few months later, its father will die, too.

It's taken nearly 80 years, but that vague hypothesis is at last taking shape. Researchers have recently figured out that mating seems to change several critical biochemical pathways based on cholesterol into various hormones in female octopuses