The rising demands in the global cephalopod trade have encouraged the Spanish aquaculture company Nueva Pescanova to push forward with their plans to open the world's first octopus farm next year.
Proponents of the venture claim that the breeding programs will provide local jobs. Zoologists, ethicists, and environmentalists warn that there are plenty of reasons not to farm octopuses.
Many commonly eaten species can breed prolifically, grow body mass quickly, and take just a year or two to mature.
There are a lot of costs and problems associated with the idea of seafood farming.
They prefer to eat live prey when they are young. They can become aggressive when penned in with one another, often to the point of self-mutilation. An escape artist, the octopuses are notorious for finding clever ways to slip free.
Serious environmental concerns continue to be posed by Aquaculture in general. Despite improvements over the past two decades, the industry is still a source of pollutants and greenhouse emissions.
Nueva Pescanova treat these obstacles as pragmatic, expecting to solve them with science, though they are notoriously tight-lipped on what this might eventually look like.
The challenge may prove harder to fix.
Over the years, research has shown us that octopuses have a nervous system that is completely different from ours, and that they are capable of not only solving complex problems, but also experiencing emotions.
The UK, Norway, and Austria are some of the states that have granted protections for the animals in their animal rights legislature.
On the northwestern coast of Spain, the king of seafood dishes is octopus. The global market for animals is expected to see nearly 630,000 metric tons of animals traded by the year 2025, up from 380,000 tons just a couple of years ago.
With its research center based in Galicia, Nueva Pescanova hopes to cash in and provide the market with around 3,000 tons of affordable octopus meat annually by 2026, spending 65 million euro to make the idea a reality.
David Chavarrias, the center's director, claims that they are already finding solutions to problems that make it difficult to farm octopuses, such as their tendency to turn on one another in confinement.
Chavarrias told the news service that they had not found cannibalistic behavior in any of their cultures.
The debate over adequate nutrition isn't one for the sake of it, but for culture, capitalism, and cuisine.
If you can corner that piece of the market, you can make a lot of money, given enough time and investment.
It isn't a problem we can solve with research if it's worth the suffering to an animal that has so little in common with humans.
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