June 21, 2016 at 04:02AM

Today I Learned: 1) Our university gets a roughly 50% discount on DNA oligos from IDT. That adds up really damned quick! 2) There are squid that take care of their eggs! A female of the deep-sea squid Gonatus onyx will lay a gigantic sack of eggs, which she will carry around in front of her for quite a while (not sure how long) until they hatch, protecting and aerating them. This comes at quite a cost to the mother -- it's thought that she gnaws off her feeding tentacles when she lays the eggs so that they won't get in the way, and she definitely can't hunt or eat during the brooding. 3) On a related note, today I also learned that the longest-lived known eggs are those of the deep-sea octopus Graneledone boreopacifica. Eggs of this species can take as long as 53 months, and possibly longer, to develop and hatch. How do we know this? As described inn one of the more peculiar articles I've read in a while (free: http://ift.tt/28LlIpw, it's an oddly... personal article), a mother G. boreopacifica was observed on five separate occasions brooding the same nest over a period of 4 years, 4 months. She very likely did not eat during that time. For reference, that's more than twice as long as the entire lifespan of most shallow-water octopus species. How could gestation possibly take so long? That's almost certainly due to the frigid temperatures at the depths in which G. boreopacifica thrives -- the temperature of the nest site varied between 2 and 4 degrees celcius. That cold temperature leads to very slow metabolisms, which explains 1) why the baby octopodes take so long to grow and 2) how the mother can survive such a long wait. For a list of some other species with extremely long gestation times, check out the linked article above, third paragraph of the Discussion. The stand-outs are frilled sharks, which carry live embryos for 42 months, and alpine salamanders, which gestate for up to four years before giving birth! This fact, and the previous one, brought to you by Mengsha Gong. Thanks Mengsha!