The race to stop octopus farming before it starts

Last year, California and Washington state banned farming octopuses for their meat, and bills have been introduced in seven other states — plus the US Senate — to do the same. Lawmakers in Chile and Spain are weighing a prohibition on farming them, too.

All this legislative activity, and yet there’s not a single octopus farm anywhere in the world.

The movement to ban octopus farming before it starts — led by animal welfare activists, ocean conservationists, and concerned academics — might be easy to dismiss as a solution in search of a problem. On paper, farming them doesn’t even make sense: they’re wild, solitary, carnivorous, and cannibalistic; in the first two months of their lives they’re incredibly fragile and the vast majority die; and their urine contains high amounts of ammonia, which means whatever company that farms them would have to deal with the ordeal of a lot of polluted water.

They’re also talented escape artists.

These are all traits you really don’t want in an animal you’re trying to farm. But it hasn’t stopped the Spanish seafood giant Nueva Pescanova from trying to make large-scale octopus farming a thing in order to supply “premium international markets,” like the US, South Korea, and Japan, where consumer demand for octopus meat is on the rise.

Currently, huge numbers of octopuses are already caught from the wild to be used for food. In 2023, over 350,000 metric tons of octopuses were captured from the ocean, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, which totals well over 100 million individual animals. They’re typically caught in traps — which they mistake for natural shelter — and then killed using a variety of disturbing methods, including clubbing them in the head, stabbing their brains, or hanging them in the air to suffocate to death.

But octopus catches have declined in some regions due to overfishing — and so, to create a more reliable supply, Nueva Pescanova hopes to open its first octopus farm as soon as it passes an environmental review. But to those who oppose octopus farming, the pursuit is impractical at best, and morally atrocious at worst, given the animals’ complex needs and impressive cognitive abilities. Octopuses can use tools, solve problems, and they even like to engage in play. In the wild, their home ranges span several acres where they hunt, hide, and explore.

“This is a solitary animal that requires a lot of stimulus…So putting it into a confined setting that has high density with other [animals] creates immeasurable stress, produces aggression, produces high levels of cannibalism,” Sophika Kostyniuk, an ecologist and managing director of the nonprofit Aquatic Life Institute, told me. “It is just totally unethical.”

The (im)practicalities of octopus farming

In 2019, Nueva Pescanova said it had figured out how to raise octopuses in captivity — that it could successfully hatch octopus eggs, raise them to adulthood, and breed them for another generation. Farmed octopus meat would be on store shelves by 2023, the company said at the time. But its start date remains unclear, as its proposed farm in the Canary Islands is still awaiting environmental review.

Another major Spanish seafood company, Grupo Profand — which didn’t respond to an interview request for this story — and a few university research centers are also busy trying to figure out how to commercialize octopus farming.

In 2023, the nonprofit Eurogroup for Animals obtained Nueva Pescanova’s plans for its first octopus farm on the Canary Islands, which was first reported by the BBC. The documents revealed that the company planned to:

Both in the wild and in captivity, it’s not uncommon for octopuses to turn cannibalistic at high densities. But Nueva Pescanova has claimed it hasn’t observed any cannibalism in its trials. That caught the attention of Jennifer Mather, an octopus expert and psychology professor at the University of Lethbridge, who believes octopuses cannot be economically nor humanely farmed. Mather told me she had asked Nueva Pescanova to send her the data, which, she alleges, the company declined to provide.

“That makes my scientist alarm bells go off,” Mather said. “Show me the evidence, and in the case of a commercial enterprise, if they don’t show me the evidence, I suspect it’s because the evidence isn’t there.”

Nueva Pescanova declined an interview request for this story and didn’t respond to a question about Mather’s request for data. Over email, a spokesperson said that “not a single case of cannibalism has been recorded in five generations of octopuses raised by Nueva Pescanova in aquaculture.”

Mather has other reasons to think farming octopuses is not feasible. Octopuses are carnivores who are “nuts about crabs,” she said, but feeding them crabs, which are expensive, is “economically not a good idea.” If you feed them fish pellets, which Nueva Pescanova has stated it will, “they’ll eat them, but they will grow more slowly and gain less weight,” Mather said, which is a strike against the commercial viability of octopus farming.

But Nueva Pescanova’s plan states that its octopuses can quickly reach a market weight of 2.5 to 3 kilograms with a mortality rate of 10 to 15 percent.

The company has also argued that farming octopuses will help conserve wild populations. Mather dismisses that claim, explaining that wild octopus populations are generally fine because the commercial fishing industry’s plundering of the oceans has killed off many of the octopus’ predators, like sharks and large fishes. While octopus populations in Spanish waters have fallen in recent years due to overfishing, Nueva Pescanova’s conservation claim is dubious; there’s little to no evidence that fish farming has helped wild fish populations rebound.

Who wants octopus farming?

I wanted to talk to someone supportive of octopus farming, and since Nueva Pescanova and Grupo Profand wouldn’t talk to me, I reached out to Roger Villanueva.

A marine biologist at the Institut de Ciències del Mar, part of the Spanish government’s national research council, Villanueva has studied octopuses for decades — including how to farm them. A couple months ago, he co-authored a letter in the journal Marine Policy arguing against a proposed ban on octopus farming in the US, calling for a “balanced approach” to the issue. Over 100 of his peers signed it, too. (It’s worth noting that his co-author on the letter consults for a Japanese fast food chain that specializes in octopus dishes, and several of the co-signers have affiliations with the seafood industry, including some with ties to Nueva Pescanova).

When I spoke to Villanueva, he didn’t deny that there are some practical obstacles that stand in the way of commercializing octopus farming, though he believes they can be overcome. But he doesn’t agree with the welfare concerns.

“The animals are intelligent,” he acknowledged, but in his view, farming them is not fundamentally different from farming chickens or pigs — “animals that we [have used] as food for many, many thousands of years.” It’s an argument Nueva Pescanova has made, too. The movement to preemptively ban farming octopus, Villanueva told me, comes from a “sentimental point of view.”

But the fact that we farm chickens and pigs for food isn’t really an argument in favor of farming octopuses, considering how terribly farmed pigs and chickens are treated. What’s likely more relevant is that octopuses possess so many traits and behaviors that are incompatible with intensive farming: they’re solitary, but on farms, they’d be tightly packed into tanks with other octopuses. They like dark shelters, but they would be subjected to occasional periods of constant light. They’re carnivorous hunters who would be forced to subsist on manmade pellets. And their cognitive sophistication, plus how little we understand about how to give them a good life in captivity, could further compound that suffering.

But Villanueva said that farms can measure and improve octopuses’ welfare in a number of ways, such as observing their appetites, checking cortisol levels, and monitoring skin color changes, which can provide insight into their moods. Farms can maintain good water quality, keep small and large octopuses separate (to reduce cannibalism), and provide places for them to hide and shelter, as they like to do in the wild — all things that Nueva Pescanova says it will do.

“It’s not easy work” to ensure good welfare on octopus farms, Villanueva said, but it’s possible if farms develop good standards.

None of this, however, sits well with Mather. “You can do all these things to figure out whether they’re stressed or not — the answer’s going to be, ‘Yes, they are,’” Mather said. “And then what do you do?”

More fundamentally, Mather said, octopus farming denies octopuses the ability to be octopuses. “The freedom to express species-typical behavior is in some ways the most important welfare one,” she said. It’s not just about “surviving until somebody comes and slaughters you; it’s about, ‘Are we really taking away the fundamentals of an animal’s life?’”

The academics are fighting

The disagreements between Villanueva and Mather reflect a broader divide among the scientists who study aquatic animals, and the kinds of questions they ask.

Jennifer Jacquet, an environmental science and policy professor at the University of Miami, is leading the academic charge against octopus farming, including a letter in support of a US-wide ban that was signed by around 100 academics. She told me that much of the marine science research community aims not to protect oceans and help wild animal populations thrive for their own sake, but to “increase [food] production, maybe make fisheries sustainable so that they don’t kill themselves by totally over-exploiting” fish populations. “You really have to think of [the field] as completely beholden to the industry interests.”

Mather said that many in the cephalopod research community — those who study octopuses, squids, cuttlefish, and some other animals — “are not fundamentally interested in the animals qua animals; they’re interested in the animals as subjects,” she said, of “exploitative enterprise.” (In a 2010 newsletter of the Cephalopod International Advisory Council — an organization for cephalopod scientists — one member wrote that she was looking for a publisher for a cephalopod cookbook, for which many fellow members had “contributed some fabulous recipes.”)

There’s a similar dynamic at play in the academic fields that study animals farmed on land.

Still, while a significant segment of the cephalopod research community is focused on how octopuses can be used commercially, many within it — and outside of it — are pushing to protect octopuses from suffering and exploitation.

Octopuses are used in experimental research by scientists in a range of scientific fields, including evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and robotics. In the 1990s, Mather helped get some basic welfare protections for cephalopods used in experiments in her home country of Canada; other countries later followed. By 2012, a group of prominent neuroscientists declared that evidence indicates that all birds and mammals, “and many other creatures, including octopuses,” possess the capacity for consciousness.

And public interest in octopuses swelled in 2021, when the hit Netflix documentary My Octopus Teacher — which captivated audiences with a story of a human relationship with a wild octopus in South Africa — won the Oscar for best documentary (Mather was a scientific adviser on the documentary). A year later, the UK passed a law declaring that all vertebrate animals and some invertebrates — including cephalopods — are sentient, and that future laws need to consider their welfare.

But the specter of octopus farming could pose a major setback to this progress. And it reveals that there’s no point beyond which the industries that raise animals for food will think twice about how far they’re pushing the animals themselves. They’ll breed chickens to grow so big they can’t walk, just to squeeze more meat out of each bird. They’ll cram salmon, who make epic migratory journeys in the wild, into small tanks. They’ll tightly pack solitary octopuses if it can help them expand into new markets.

But Mather and some of her welfare-minded colleagues want industry to look at more than just profit. “When it comes right down to it, how to make a lot of money should not be what we really care about,” she said. “We share this planet with the animals — all the animals — and our basic orientation should be, ‘Are we caring?’”