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Aquaculture and Fishing<br>The Octopus Conundrum
By Amanda Loudin<br>Jun 27, 2026
Graphic by Adam Dixon
Increasingly in demand, wild octopus populations are dwindling. Can farming ever be the answer?
When journalist Richard Schweid first heard about octopus farming, he was opposed. He saw no need to farm the gentle, sentient being as a food source for wealthy consumers who can source their proteins elsewhere. But his curiosity led him to begin a years-long immersion and study of the practice, leading to his upcoming book Life on the Octopus Farm. After spending years working on a Mayan octopus farm, he’s now convinced octopus farming is the right thing to do.<br>Read Next
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“In the wild, only a small fraction of octopus eggs make it to adulthood,” said Schweid. “In farming, if we can create conditions where we can raise all those babies, we might have enough food to address food insecurity in some regions.”<br>If raised affordably, octopus can provide a nutrient-dense meat, full of protein, omega 3s, and vitamin B12. And according to Schweid, raising octopus is much less harmful to the environment than beef.<br>Schweid’s opinion stands in opposition to legions of others, however. A 2025 survey in the E.U. and the U.K., for instance, revealed widespread support for banning octopus farming. In the United States, both Washington and California banned the practice in 2024, and the same year, U.S. Senators Whitehouse of Rhode Island (D) and Murkowski of Maine (R) introduced a bill to prohibit commercial octopus farming nationwide. All this before any research institution or commercial operation has cracked the code on making octopus farming a viable, sustainable business.<br>“Research centers have been trying to create octopus farming for 50 years,” said Ian Gleadall, professor of marine biology at Tohoku University in Japan. “It’s still a long way off.”<br>But that hasn’t stopped the outcry against it. While many consumers are quite comfortable with farming and eating animals like cows, pigs, and chickens, the octopus somehow strikes a more sympathetic chord. Documentaries like My Octopus Teacher and the book-turned-Netflix movie Remarkably Bright Creatures have introduced the octopus to the public eye, highlighting the animal’s intelligence and interactive personality. “The octopus currently carries quite a bit of weight as a cultural icon, and is odd-looking to boot,” said Schweib.<br>A 2021 review of over 300 scientific studies from the London School of Economics led the U.K. to expand its Animal Welfare Act to recognize all cephalopod mollusks (which includes octopuses) as sentient animals.<br>That said, from Japan and Korea to Spain, Portugal, and the United States, octopus is a highly desirable menu item. But the wild sources aren’t keeping up with demand. Overfishing may be one reason, and climate change another, but there’s no real consensus. “They’ve become quite scarce in recent years,” said Gleadall. “No one has figured out why yet.”<br>Thus, the incentive to farm. Many hurdles stand in the way, but researchers and farmers in several regions of the globe will continue their efforts to develop profitable octopus aquaculture.<br>Barriers to Success<br>Much of the public’s focus—and understanding—of octopus farming centers on Spain’s Nueva Pescanova, a large-scale fishing, farming, and processing operation. In 2019, the company announced that it had made a breakthrough in hatching octopus eggs and raising them to adulthood. The company promised to have its product on store shelves by 2023, raising and farming the creatures in a Canary Islands facility. But the BBC got hold of the company’s plans, released them to the public, and a loud outcry followed.<br>To date, Nueva Pescanova has not successfully farmed octopus and may have even abandoned its efforts. The company remains notoriously quiet and shy of the press, according to Schweib and others, leaving the issue to speculation. (Offrange reached out multiple times, to no avail.) Whether Pescanova or another operation, however, there are major barriers to raising octopus at scale.<br>The primary hurdle is developing a method to feed the octopus and then keep them alive, especially newly hatched babies, which have a voracious appetite. Researchers/farmers have struggled to find an affordable way to meet their nutritional needs, which vary from one species to another. Adults, in general, prefer crabs, clams, and other shellfish, while babies prefer to eat plankton. “Their diets are tricky and need to be timed carefully,” said Gleadall. “This is especially true in the para-larval stage, which lasts a month.”<br>Farmers have tried to feed paralarvae artemia, a type of brine shrimp, which is common in some types of fish aquaculture, but discovered it is...