Ghost, the giant Pacific octopus, has laid eggs and entered the final stage of her life cycle, senescence. Senescence begins when a female lays eggs and devotes the rest of her life to caring for them, neglecting her own basic needs like eating.

For the safety of our animals and to prevent early senescence, we do not pair octopuses with a mate. Ghost's eggs are unfertilized.

GPOs are amazing animals that only live to be four to five years old on average. While we don’t know Ghost's exact age, based on her weight and size we can approximate she is in that age range.

She is a wonderful octopus and has made an eight-armed impression on all of our hearts. In the coming days, she will be moved behind the scenes for the remainder of her life. 🐙🖤👻

Senescence is an Australian figurative artist whose drawings merge anatomical knowledge with Japanese and European surrealism.

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Persisting with Reason

Study of the developing mouse finds developmentally programmed transient and long-lived senescent cells (a diverse cell type that doesn't divide anymore, but metabolises and, in certain situations, has a physiological function) in initiating and maintaining the blood-brain and the blood-cerebrospinal fluid barriers that are essential for brain and nervous system function

Read the original published research article here

Clip from a video from work by L. Ashley Watson, Zoe Adelsheim and Mackenzie J. Carter, and colleagues

Department of Neurobiology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Cell, June 2026