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.
