( Also read about the growing trend for pet octopuses.) Big brains, complex behavior, and precocious curiosity have made these improbable mollusks mediagenic poster creatures for animal rights and welfare-and the subject of an emerging battle over the ethics and potential environmental impacts of raising them for food. Pigs, however, aren’t as graceful, mysterious, and charismatic as octopuses. “I know those who would never eat them but have no qualms about eating pigs, and there's abundant evidence that pigs are highly intelligent.” “People have this weird love affair with octopuses,” says biologist Rich Ross at the California Academy of Science, in San Francisco. For many people, however, they mean much more than tasty tidbits. Demand and prices have surged in recent years, even as catches have fallen in traditional octopus meccas such as Spain and Japan and as warming, acidifying seas threaten further declines.Īt a glance, therefore, these tasty tentacle bearers seem ripe for aquaculture. Long staples of Mediterranean and East Asian cuisines, octopus ( pulpo in Spanish, tako in Japanese) is now a global delicacy, buoyed by the popularity of sushi, tapas, poke, and desire for high-quality protein. Not good, a new contingent of critics contends: Octopus aquaculture will further deplete marine ecosystems and needlessly torment these most sensitive and intelligent of invertebrates. Now they’re becoming an ethical flashpoint, as researchers like Rosas puzzle out ways to make commercial octopus farming feasible and, they claim, relieve growing pressure on wild populations. “ Maravilloso!” he murmurs.Īround the world, octopuses have long been objects of desire and wonder. Even Rosas, a biologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico who's worked for years to turn creatures like this into a profitable commodity, delights in its prehensile grace. A mouse-size octopus with tentacles like knotted threads, ghostly pale save for big, black eyes, wriggles across his palm and twines around his fingers. He coaxes its wary occupant out onto his hand. SISAL, YUCATÁN, MEXICOIn a damp, darkened shoreside laboratory near the Yucatán hamlet of Sisal, Carlos Rosas Vázquez lifts one of the scores of small conch shells littering a black plastic tank.