Almost 275,000 individual octopuses will be killed annually if a recently proposed farm in the Canary Islands becomes a reality.
The phrase "octopus culture" brings to mind Octopolis and Octlantis, two communities of wild octopuses in Australia.
In Octopolis, there are many octopuses sharing and fighting over a small area of the sea. In these watery towns, male and female octopuses fight over territory and throw debris at one another.
The biologists who have long described the octopuses as solitary animals that interact with others in three different contexts were surprised by the discovery of the communities.
Octopolis suggests that in the wild, an overly dense captive environment can lead to dominance hierarchies in octopuses.
In their fights for power, male octopuses throw shells to defend their den and display a display which makes them look like a vampire.
Light colors and flattened body postures are signals of compliance by submissive octopuses. The dominants seem to have gained better access to high-quality dens.
The culture of Octopolis and Octlantis is called octopus culture. The idea of animal culture came about after scientists noticed that some animals perform actions that are not seen in other groups of the same species.
Kinji Imanishi, a Japanese primatologist, observed that a group of Japanese macaques on Koshima Island would wash sweet potatoes in the water before eating them.
Observers were lucky to observe the origin of this new behavior, which was not seen in other macaque groups. A monkey named Imo was the first to wash a potato in salty water and others followed her, leading to a community-wide behavior pattern.
In Europe and North America, the idea of culture in animals didn't get much attention until 1999, when an article about culture in Chimpanzees was published.
Evidence of culture has been found across the animal kingdom, including among fish, birds, and insects.
When cultural animals are brought together, they can help create society.
The cultural behaviors coupled with the captive environment will be a novel environmental niche that shapes subsequent evolution.
The animals that we know and love are different from the animals they evolved from.
Many domesticated animals are not able to survive without human care. Domestic rabbits, that have evolved without the instincts and coloring wild rabbits have to protect them from predators, sheep whose wool grows too thick without regular trimming, and chickens bred for meat that can't walk as adults are examples.
A commitment to creating a new kind of animal that relies on humans for their existence is what makes starting a farm of octopuses so important. It isn't an idea to be taken up lightly, or a project that can be attempted and then discarded when it turns out to be too difficult or not profitable.
There are a lot of reasons to worry about the octopus farm. Unlike other animals, the octopuses need a lot of space. One can only wonder what Octopolis will look like on a scale of thousands.
They are emotional animals that feel pain. A recent report was commissioned by the department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in the United Kingdom and reviewed the scientific evidence for pain experience in squid and cuttlefish.
Welfare laws protect sentient animals used for food and should minimize their pain. clubbing, slicing open the brain, and suffocating them are some of the methods used to kill octopuses.
The authors of the report concluded that none of the methods of slaughter are humane.
They are escape artists. Since an enriched environment will be one full of possible escape routes, the kind of housing needed to shelter them will be difficult to achieve.
Thousands of domesticated cultural octopuses can't be released into the sea if a farm is started and then abandoned.
It is not easy to bring captive cultural animals into the wild, as we learned from the many attempts to release Keiko, the killer whale that starred in the Free Willy franchise. Keiko died in captivity after spending 20 million dollars.
The proposal to bring thousands of animals together into a megacity would be far beyond anything found in nature or in captivity.
Hundreds of thousands of Keikos, aquatic cultural animals captured from the wild and brought into captivity, would be created. It would force them to live together and create a new culture.
We are starting to rethink current practices of intensive animal farming after learning that the octopuses feel emotions and have culture.
It is not the right time to propose such a scheme. We now know what we know.
Professor, philosophy, York University, Canada.
This article is free to use under a Creative Commons license. The original article is worth a read.
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