Kanaloa, and the Monster of the Deep

In Hawaiian tradition the great god Kanaloa, lord of the ocean and the underworld, is associated with the octopus (he'e) as one of his forms, a powerful and ambivalent deity of the deep waters. Other coastal peoples imagined vast octopus- or squid-like sea monsters, the Akkorokamui of the Ainu of northern Japan, and the giant cephalopods behind later tales of the kraken of the northern seas, expressing the ocean's power to seize and drag down. Across these settings the octopus stands for the sea's intelligence and its menace at once: a creature of the depths that is both wonder and threat, described here within the traditions that hold it.

Set against that intelligence is an unusually short life: most octopus species live only one to two years, and a female typically breeds only once, laying tens of thousands of eggs and then guarding and aerating them without feeding herself for weeks or months until they hatch, after which she dies, a single intense act of parental care that closes a short and solitary life; the combination of a famously clever mind and so brief and self-sacrificing an end has struck many of the scientists who study the animal as one of its strangest features. Species-level accuracy matters here: the octopus most often cited for this short, intense life cycle is the giant Pacific octopus, Enteroctopus dofleini, the largest known octopus species, with confirmed arm spans exceeding four metres, a scale that makes its single-brood death after months of unfed egg-guarding all the more striking.