Octopus Farms - sustainability or cruelty?

Some were burrowed into the small, plastic cave-like dwellings that sat at the bottom of their tanks — hiding from the hoots and hollers of excitable tourists. Others crawled around the inside walls of their sink, eyeballing their voyeurs and ignoring the two or three plastic bath toys that floated in lazy circles on the surface above them.

Slim Shady — a young male day octopus — reached up and touched the hand of a man who’d been gently splashing the surface, wriggling his fingers just beneath, hoping to make a connection with this alien life form.

“There you go,” said the man soothingly; his hand now wrapped in the embrace of at least two curious tentacles. “That’s a good boy.”

Despite attempts by entrepreneurs such as Conroy and companies such as Nueva Pescanova, in Spain, a successful commercially operating octopus farm does not yet exist. Nobody has yet figured out how to close the octopus life cycle in a commercially desirable species — that is, getting reproductive adults to mate, lay eggs and have offspring that develop into reproductive adults.

The chance that Conroy’s facility or another will someday learn to breed octopuses in captivity, however, still worries animal welfare advocates and conservationists.

“This is a luxury product,” Jacquet said. “It is going to be grown to feed a satiated market that has excess money to buy luxury goods. To me, the octopus farm characterizes extreme excess with no ethical regard for a nonhuman life.”

In 2021, researchers at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., successfully closed the life cycle in the pygmy zebra octopus.

Although that was a first, Robyn Crook, an octopus biologist at San Francisco State University, said the eggs and paralarvae of pygmy zebra octopuses are very different from the kinds commercial farms are hoping to capitalize on.

“Octopuses have two slightly different universes of reproduction,” she said.

Some, like the pygmy zebra octopus, produce a relatively small number of large eggs, “about the size of a pea,” she said.

Others, like the day octopus, or Octopus cyanea, and the common octopus, or Octopus vulgaris, produce hundreds of thousands of very small eggs.

They are desirable because of their high yield, Crook said. It’s just that nobody has figured out how to keep these small hatchlings alive for long.

Joyner, the Kanaloa Octopus Farm biologist, said the facility was trying to determine what the paralarvae hatchlings eat, calling it a “missing piece of the puzzle.” They have been able to keep the paralarvae alive for only 13 days post hatching.

“When these guys hatch out they are about the size of a half a grain of rice. They are very, very small and they are very picky eaters, as well,” she said. “They really only like to eat live foods that are smaller than they are. And unfortunately, at this time, we haven’t figured out exactly what that is.”

But that’s not the only problem facing would-be octopus farmers.

Octopuses are antisocial and “aggressive, so you put two of those guys together in a tank and they’ll kill one another,” said Jacquet. “That would ruin the product.”

Also, octopuses require live food such as fish, crabs and clams to survive.

“Octopuses are very finicky,” said Peter Tse, a neurobiologist at Dartmouth University who studies octopus intelligence. “They really only want to eat living things that they have killed themselves.”

And finally, there’s the issue of pollution. Octopuses produce high levels of nitrogen and phosphorous as waste. That dirty water then gets pumped back into the ocean “and you know — in a sensitive place like Hawaii,” said Jacquet, that can really do some damage.

But most problematic, said the researchers, is the ethical question of whether keeping highly intelligent creatures in sterile tanks for their entire lives is acceptable.

Crook noted that in the United States there are no laws protecting octopuses and other cephalopods, such as squid and cuttlefish; they are not considered animals by the federal government.

Two years ago, a team of legal scholars sent a petition to the National Institutes of Health urging classification of cephalopods as animals. And although Canada, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand have laws protecting octopuses, they are still without protections in the United States.

“You need to have much more regulation on what people are doing with sentient creatures. Whether it’s for research. Whether it’s for food production. Or entertainment. There’s a much larger conversation we need to have,” said Kathy Hessler, director of the Animal Legal Education Initiative at George Washington University Law School.

The current lack of legal protections leaves octopuses, like the ones at Kanaloa, vulnerable to inhumane treatment and abuse, said both Hessler and Crook.

“There is very little known about veterinary treatment for octopuses,” said Crook. “Very little about pain relief and nothing at all about humane slaughter. All of these things where we’ve seen big advancements in aquaculture fin fish over the last 20 years, none of that is established for cephalopods.”

Octopuses “are behaviorally complex and they live in a very complex environment and so when we think about what is the right way to keep them in captivity, their environment should replicate that complexity,” she said.

From the photos she has seen of Kanaloa, she sees very little evidence these animals are being provided the stimulation and enrichment their intelligence requires.

“Looks like straight-up tourist attraction to me,” she said.

octopus makes the best sushi.

fried octopus is even better than squid.

I know it makes the children cry but I'll happily eat it in front of them.

Listen to its screams.

Yum, Yum, Yum

Lol R3 and R4.

The score is tied, 1-1.

You know years ago, there was a war on chapulines with vendors getting banned for not treating them humanely.... to roast.

Yep, even if you're roasting grasshoppers they have to die with dignity.

How is this different from raising intelligent pigs or cows, and then eating them later?

I swear, the animal rights activists are fucking lunatics.

I'm a carnivore but I would never eat octopus.

Cruelty. Octopi are very resilient and smarter than people realize.

I will never eat an octopus again. I have only a couple of times, and after seeing the film My Octopus Teacher, nope.

Some things should not be food.

Given how smart they are, they're probably consciously choosing to stay in captivity, until they're ready to leave.

It might be one thing if they were being raised to be eaten. We are cruel about our food. But using them for a petting zoo is indeed pretty gross - considering how awful those little tanks are. Are they social creatures with each other?

Bleeding heart bullshit

Anyone who eats octopus deserves to be stoned to death. For real, y'all!

I can't even read this-- cruel, cruel, cruel.

Seriously, they'll get out when they want to. Frankly I'd take captivity and clean water over the ocean as it is right now.

I enjoyed this movie. Octopi are clever. But so are pigs, and I love pork. At least in my country pigs are raised on humane farms and I shell out for the "ethical" farms where the pigs are grazed and pastured.