Following up on last week’s column about seal pups and because this weekend is Mother’s Day, I am writing about some amazing ocean mothers. There is a wide range of mothering styles among ocean animals as well as degrees of independence of their offspring from an early age. Starting with seals, they follow the more intensive caregiving style that is most similar to human mothering behaviors.

As fellow mammals, seals have a small number of offspring that they care for individually and for a long period of time. Years ago, as a naturalist aboard whale watching trips, we used an acronym to remember the characteristics of marine mammals — WHALE. This stands for: warm blooded, has hair, air breathers, live birth and eats milk. The two stand-out mothering components of this are the L and the E. When you think about this a bit, it’s pretty incredible that an ocean-dwelling creature has live birth. Seal mothers typically come ashore to give birth, but whales and porpoises do not, somehow managing to give birth in the water. Once these young are born — pups in the case of seals and calves in the case of whales and porpoises — the mothers nurse their young for extended periods of time. This is also somehow accomplished while swimming and continues sometimes for longer than a month!

During the long mothering period of marine mammals, the young will sometimes accompany their mothers on hunting excursions before they eventually learn how to do it on their own. They often start by catching smaller fish and shellfish before working their way up to larger prey. During these excursions, the young pups and calves also get practice swimming for longer periods of time as they grow bigger and stronger. Then, after a month or two, they’re off on their own. Whale calves stay with their moms a bit longer, sometimes sticking around up to a year or more before becoming independent. Whether a couple of months or a year, this seems astonishingly short given the at least 18-year period of human mothering.

In the marine world, however, caring for young for a year is epic. This mothering style is radically different than that of the much more numerous fish that have much more numerous offspring and have very little to do with what happens to them in terms of their survival. As egg-layers, the females release the eggs into the water where they are then fertilized by male fish. Sometimes, one parent or the other will take care of the eggs as they develop, but often the eggs are simply released to develop on their own and hopefully survive to be larvae and eventually fully grown adults. This is the case for most saltwater fish.

One exception is the Acadian redfish (Sebastes fasciatus). Also known as ocean perch or a rockfish, these fish are unusual in the way they reproduce and the way they look. Rockfish are much more common in warmer waters where their often brightly colored bodies seem to fit in better. Acadian redfish are the only rockfish species that live in the Gulf of Maine, their orange-red bodies and big eyes standing out among their more drab-colored fellow saltwater fish. Their color also stands out among the dark depths where they live — among the rocky or muddy habitat often close to 1,000 feet down. While they aren’t mammals, redfish have a variation of live birth. The female keeps her eggs inside where they are fertilized and develop for a month or two until ready to hatch. Unlike marine mammals, which typically give birth to a single pup or calf, redfish have up to 200,000 eggs. Because they develop inside the mother, they are born as tiny little fish that can swim immediately.

Two-hundred thousand eggs may seem like a lot, but that’s a tiny number compared to other saltwater fish, some of which can lay more than a million eggs in a single year. But there is a big difference in survival rate when you are born swimming versus left as an egg to grow on your own. Redfish invest a lot in their offspring as far as fish go. They don’t mature until they are around 5 years old versus a haddock, for example, that can be ready to lay its first eggs when it is just 1. But they live longer than many fish — sometimes up to the age of 50. They aren’t likely to be able to reproduce that entire period but can still produce a lot of tiny redfish over their long lives.

Whether seal pup, whale calf, egg or larvae, all of these offspring start their lives with a mom and then will eventually try to find their own way to survive. This spring and this Mother’s Day, we can celebrate all of the efforts of the many moms on land and in the sea.

Susan Olcott is the director of strategic partnerships at Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association.