Bruce Robinson, a biologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, was operating a robotic camera 4,000 feet below the surface of the ocean when he spotted a purple female octopus guarding a clutch of 150 transparent eggs. The same octopus hadn’t had any eggs just a month before.
Robinson and his team returned to that spot 18 times during the next 53 months, and each time the mother octopus was still there, cleaning and circulating oxygen-rich water around her eggs. Octopuses, which seldom live longer than two years, typically do not leave their eggs or eat until their eggs hatch.
Finally, after almost 41/2 years, they found the eggs had hatched and the mother octopus, who had been looking quite old, had died. We may be surprised at octopuses’ ability to solve puzzles, play tricks on people and understand things like cameras, but we must never question how much a mother octopus is willing to sacrifice to care for her young.
When a car bomb set fire to a home in Chile, firefighters were called. After they arrived, a mother dog named Amanda emerged from the burning building with a 10-day-old puppy in her mouth and placed it gently on the stairs of the fire truck.
Four more times she entered the blaze, emerging each time carrying a puppy she placed on the fire truck’s stairs. When they were all safe, she lay beside them, shielding them from the heat. Only one of the puppies, a female named Amparo, did not survive. The rest were fine.
In another instance, when firefighters approached a burning house in Pennsylvania, they found the blaze was so intense they could not enter. When a cat ran into the building, they thought it was crazy. However, it emerged a minute later with a kitten in its mouth, then it ran back into the house.
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After two more minutes, it came back out carrying another kitten, which it placed next to the first one. The fire chief said the mother cat was “the bravest creature I have ever seen during all my years of firefighting.”
In Edie Creek, New Guinea, a woman won a lease for a plot of gold mine land, which she planned to use to make it possible for her two schoolboy sons to eventually go to college. It turned out to be a poor piece of land, with overburden that had to be removed and no water with which to wash out the gold.
She eventually got permission to use a neighbor’s water supply, but only from midnight to 6 a.m. So that’s what she did, washing bits of gold in the dark, bitter cold every night while the rest of the camp slept. Each morning she returned home to care for her family.
A mother and her daughter were only a few minutes into their hike in Squamish, British Columbia, when an 88-pound cougar, probably close to starvation, attacked the girl. The mother jumped on the back of the cougar and was eventually able to wrestle it off her daughter. When the two were finally safe, the daughter asked, “Why didn’t the kitty play nice?”
There are an abundance of stories about mothers who have done things like chase and catch runaway school buses that had their children on them or who have done other spectacular things. As Rudyard Kipling said, “God could not be everywhere, and therefore he made mothers.”
I must confess, though, the stories that impress me the most are those about moms that do the really difficult things about which newspapers never write, like taking care of children with special needs.
We all owe our mothers more than we even realize. It’s important this Mother’s Day to find some way to show your appreciation while you still have the chance.
There are, for example, literally hundreds of brunch choices around Naperville. It’s the least you can do. No, seriously, it really is the least you can do. If you try, you can think of a way to do a lot more.