Farming Octopuses: Are There No Boundaries?

The lines are long at the Seattle Aquarium’s annual February Octopus Week, with the Octopus Blind Date on St. Valentines Day its highlight, attracting hundreds, if not thousands, to witness a potential Octopus mating.

By any measure, Octopuses are wondrous creatures as smart as your golden retriever. With a larger centralized brain than that of all animals except birds and mammals, they’re neurological marvels with advanced capabilities. 

Amazingly, each of its eight legs contains a mini brain, assisting the primary brain in local control. Evolving over 300 million years into complex organisms, octopuses are the most cerebral of the invertebrates. We humans are late interlopers, having been here by most scientific estimates a mere 200,000 years as recognizable homo Sapiens.

Endowed with nine brains in all, 500 million neurons, and three hearts, they can open prescription bottles, use tools, deceive predators, and exhibit personalities. The two supplementary hearts help in supplying oxygen. Octopus blood is blue because of its oxygen-carrying pigment, hemocyanin.

Octopuses can even distinguish people, some of whom they dislike, which shows they have memory. Affectionate, they like having visitors scratch their heads.

They’re enthusiastic when it comes to toys. Throw them a bottle or ball and they’ll play with it.

And those large eyes, so human like, yet far more complex, never cease to fascinate aquarium goers.

They’re masters at camouflage too, not merely to evade predators, as changing color can reflect their moods and health.

Sadly, octopuses have short lifespans, at most, two or three years. After mating, males become senescent and females die when their eggs hatch.

Found in all oceans, 300 known species of octopuses exist, varied in size and weight. No other invertebrates come close to these creatures in beauty, intelligence, capability, and complexity.

I recommend watching the Oscar winning Netflix documentary, My Octopus Teacher, to appreciate more fully the wondrous splendor of these evolutionary miracles of the sea.

Curious, exploratory, and affectionate, they face an ominous future, as
Octopus is increasingly a featured menu option in haute cuisine restaurants of the Western world.

Culinary octopus fare isn’t anything new, of course, particularly in Asia. It’s simply that economic interests have moved to exploit increased demand and replace diminished sea life largely from over fishing.

Between 1950 and 2015, the harvesting of wild octopuses has increased tenfold, or to an estimated 359,000 tons annually, principally by China Japan, and Mexico. African fisheries have now joined them, expanding their catch to octopuses and contributing to a further decline in their numbers.

Ominously, Spanish international Nueva Pescanova has recently announced plans to open the world’s first commercial octopus farm in 2024 in the Canary Islands, entailing the slaughter of 3000 tons of Octopus vulgaris per year, i.e., 1 million octopuses. Octopuses would be killed by placing them in water at -3C/26F temperature.

Jonathan Birch, associate professor at the London School of Economics, headed a review of more than 300 scientific studies, revealing that octopuses feel pain and pleasure, leading to their designation as “sentient beings” in the UK’s Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022.

Prof Birch believes that high-welfare octopus farming is “impossible” and that killing them by “ice slurry” assures their slow, painful death.

Proponents, however, argue that octopus farming is necessary for the protection of wild stock, the same argument they used to justify the farming of salmon, now a lucrative industry supplying 70% of consumed salmon.

Further, we are living in a time of growing human population, with the UN projecting a population of 9.7 billion by 2050, much of it occurring in developing nations deeply affected by climate change, reducing their food resources.

Proponents contend that aquaculture assures a safer consumer foodstuff, free of mercury, lead, and parasites, pointing to salmon farms as an example.

But this isn’t true, as farmed salmon are deliberately fattened, and, consequently, prone to accumulating more PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), a persistent organic pollutant.

As for parasites, sea lice infestations have been widely reported in aquaculture farms in Canada, the UK, Norway, and Ireland. Sea lice chew on salmon, creating lesions that dilute a proper salt-to-water balance.

Aquatic farming results in still further decline in wild fish numbers. Currently, one third of the world’s catch is used as feed for its farmed captives.

Unfortunately, the harvesting of farmed octopuses suggests a further expansion of factory farming with its inherent cruelties and environmental consequences.

Currently, some 550 species of sealife are now farmed, from oysters and shrimp to salmon, trout, and bluefin tuna, and this is only the beginning

The bottomline is whether an intelligent creature, the octopus, should be exploited at all.

Are there no boundaries for humans? Must we someday awake to find we’ve emptied the seas? That dolphins, whales, and octopuses are simply the stuff of memory relegated to children’s picture books?

–rj