How Well Do You Know the Ocean's Most Devoted Parents?

Think the ocean is a place where animals lay their eggs and swim away without a backwards glance? Think again. Dive Magazine has put together a true-or-false quiz all about marine parenting, and it's a handy test of everything you thought you knew about how sea creatures raise their young.

The quiz focuses on the reproductive strategies and parental behaviours of marine species, which turn out to be wildly varied. Some fish are famously hands-off, releasing millions of eggs into open water and letting chance do the rest. Others flip that script entirely. Seahorse males carry the fertilised young in a brood pouch until they hatch, one of the animal kingdom's most well-known role reversals. Emperor penguins in Antarctica take turns balancing an egg on their feet through the depths of winter, while mouthbrooding cichlids and cardinalfish protect their eggs by carrying them inside their mouths for weeks.

Then there are the long-haul parents. Humpback whale calves stay with their mothers for nearly a year, learning migration routes between breeding and feeding grounds. Orca offspring can stay with their mothers for life in some pods. And some octopus females take parental dedication to the extreme, guarding their eggs continuously and starving in the process — one deep-sea species was observed brooding for over four years.

The quiz format is quick — a minute or two of reading and clicking — which makes it an easy bit of holiday prep for anyone heading off on a diving trip or whale-watching excursion. Knowing a bit about what the animals you're hoping to see are actually doing adds a lot to the experience. Spotting a male seahorse with a swollen pouch, or a cuttlefish guarding her egg cluster, is far more rewarding when you understand the effort behind it. It can also make you a more responsible underwater visitor: plenty of marine parents are easily disturbed, and a good guide will tell you exactly where not to point a camera or drop an anchor.

If you're a diver, snorkeller, or just someone who likes marine life documentaries, this is a fun five-minute challenge. Don't be surprised if you get a few wrong — some of the facts genuinely buck expectations about how fish, sharks and marine mammals handle parenthood. Great white sharks, for instance, famously do no parenting at all once the pups are born, while the humble Jawfish mouthbroods its eggs daily, tossing them around to keep them oxygenated.

For anyone planning a dive trip or marine-focused holiday, it's the kind of light refresher worth doing on the flight out. Whether the answers make you want to book a seahorse-focused dive in Southeast Asia or a penguin expedition to the far south, a little behavioural knowledge goes a long way on the water.