
After mating with a male octopus and producing numerous eggs, she dies naturally while tending to her eggs. In a later shark attack, she shows an incredibly improved creativity to survive, including sticking on the shark's back.

In one attack upon her, the octopus loses an arm, and retreats to her den to recover, slowly regenerating the arm over three months. She frequently has to defend herself against pyjama sharks. They form a bond where she plays with Foster and allows him into her world to see how she sleeps, lives, and eats. The film shows Foster's growing intimate relationship with the octopus as he follows her around for nearly a year. He started to document his experiences and, in time, met a curious young octopus that captured his attention. The location was near Simon's Town on the Cape Peninsula, which is exposed to the cold Benguela current of the Atlantic Ocean. In 2018, Craig Foster began free-diving in a cold underwater kelp forest at a remote location in False Bay, near Cape Town, South Africa. At the 93rd Academy Awards, it won the award for Best Documentary Feature.

My Octopus Teacher is a 2020 Netflix Original documentary film directed by Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed, which documents a year spent by filmmaker Craig Foster forging a relationship with a wild common octopus in a South African kelp forest.
