The Fight Over Octopus Farming: Ethics, Science and a Race to Regulate

The Fight Over Octopus Farming: Ethics, Science and a Race to Regulate

Lawmakers, scientists, animal-welfare groups and seafood companies are locked in a heated debate over whether commercial octopus farming should ever be allowed. Last year, California and Washington state moved to ban octopus farming for food, and similar bills have been introduced in seven other U.S. states and in the U.S. Senate. Officials in Chile and Spain are also weighing prohibitions. Yet despite the flurry of proposals and counterarguments, there is not a single full-scale commercial octopus farm in operation anywhere in the world.

What’s Proposed

Spanish seafood company Nueva Pescanova has published plans — obtained by the nonprofit Eurogroup for Animals and first reported by the BBC — to build what it calls the world’s first commercial octopus farm in the Canary Islands. The documents describe an operation that would produce roughly 1 million octopuses per year, stocked at densities of 10–15 octopuses per cubic meter (a volume the company compares to the size of three dishwashers).

The proposal says animals would be kept for months until harvest. To stimulate reproduction, the company would occasionally expose animals to 24-hour periods of continuous light. The planned slaughter method described in the documents is immersion in ice slurry, a process critics say results in slow, painful hypothermic death.

Main Concerns

Opponents — a coalition of animal-welfare advocates, ocean conservationists and many academic scientists — raise multiple practical and ethical objections:

• Octopuses are highly intelligent, solitary, and behaviorally complex: they hunt, use tools, explore large home ranges and show play-like behavior.
• They are carnivorous and often prefer live prey such as crabs, which raises economic and nutritional questions for pellet-based diets.
• Young octopuses suffer very high mortality in their first weeks of life, making large-scale rearing fragile and wasteful.
• Their waste is high in ammonia, creating significant water-quality and pollution challenges for intensive systems.
• High stocking densities can increase stress, aggression and cannibalism — behaviors that are common both in the wild and in captivity under crowded conditions.
• Cruel or slow slaughter methods are a major welfare concern for critics.

"Show me the evidence... if they don’t show me the evidence, I suspect it’s because the evidence isn’t there." — Jennifer Mather, octopus researcher

Industry Claims and Scientific Debate

Nueva Pescanova has stated in public filings that its experimental program has produced five generations of octopuses without recorded cannibalism and with projected mortality of 10–15 percent and market weights of 2.5–3 kg. The company declined interview requests for this article and has not publicly released raw trial data requested by independent scientists, a point that has heightened skepticism.

Some researchers, including marine biologist Roger Villanueva, argue for a measured approach rather than pre-emptive bans. They say that welfare can be monitored and managed through careful husbandry: separate size classes to reduce cannibalism, enriched tanks with shelters, water-quality controls, and physiological and behavioral welfare metrics (appetite, skin color, cortisol or other biomarkers).

Others, including many cephalopod specialists and welfare advocates, counter that even with mitigation, intensive farming would fundamentally deny octopuses the opportunity to express species-typical behaviors and would likely cause considerable suffering. The disagreement reflects a broader divide over how marine science and aquaculture should weigh production goals against animal welfare.

Context And Broader Stakes

The debate arrives amid rising global octopus consumption. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization reported that fishers removed more than 350,000 metric tons of octopus in 2023 — an amount representing well over 100 million individual animals. Proponents of farming argue aquaculture could provide a stable supply and potentially relieve pressure on wild stocks; critics say there is little evidence fish farming has helped wild populations recover and question whether farmed octopuses would actually reduce wild take.

Public awareness of octopus intelligence has grown in recent years, boosted by media such as the documentary My Octopus Teacher. Some jurisdictions have already recognized cephalopod sentience in law, and many scientists now include octopuses when discussing animal consciousness. For these reasons, critics warn that octopus farming — if permitted and scaled — could mark a major step in expanding industrial animal agriculture into a cognitively complex invertebrate group.

Where Things Stand

Nueva Pescanova’s Canary Islands project is awaiting environmental review. Meanwhile, legislative efforts to ban octopus farming are advancing in multiple places. The controversy centers on an urgent question for regulators and the public: can octopuses ever be farmed at scale without causing unacceptable animal suffering, or should policy preclude commercial production before it begins?

What To Watch: transparency from companies about trial data, the outcome of Canary Islands environmental reviews, pending legislation in the U.S. and other countries, and peer-reviewed research on octopus welfare and husbandry.