October 8, 2024

Podcast

How the Octopus Got to the Senate

By Jennifer Jacquet, Lisa Margonelli

Octopuses are famously smart: they can recognize individual humans, solve problems, and even keep gardens. They are also a popular food for humans: around 350,000 tons of octopus are caught worldwide each year, and demand is only growing. Some governments and start-ups have invested significant resources into domesticating octopus, and the world’s first octopus farm may soon open in Spain’s Canary Islands. 


But should octopus be farmed at all? That question is being debated in several pieces of legislation right now, including a bipartisan US Senate bill. For Jennifer Jacquet, professor of environmental science and policy at the University of Miami, the answer is a resounding no. For the last decade, she has worked to end octopus farming before it begins, as she wrote in Issues in 2019. On this episode, Jacquet discusses why octopuses are poor candidates for farming, how she built a social movement around octopus protection, and why we need public conversations about new technologies before investments begin.

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Transcript

Lisa Margonelli: Welcome to The Ongoing Transformation, a podcast from Issues in Science and Technology. Issues is a quarterly journal published by the National Academy of Sciences and Arizona State University.

Octopuses are famously smart. They can solve problems; they can open jars; they can recognize individual people, and they can even—supposedly—keep gardens. In addition to all of this, they are a very popular food. Major resources have been invested into domesticating the octopus and the world’s first octopus farm may soon open in Spain’s Canary Islands. But should octopuses even be farmed? That question is being debated in several pieces of legislation right now, including a bipartisan Senate bill.

I’m Lisa Margonelli, editor-in-chief at Issues. I’m joined by Jennifer Jacquet, a professor of environmental science and policy at the University of Miami. Starting in 2014, Jennifer has worked to end octopus farming. She published her very first article on the subject in Issues back in 2019. We’ll discuss why octopuses are poor candidates for farming, how she built a social movement, and why we need public conversations about new technologies long before the investments begin.

Isn’t it odd that we are not having a public conversation about this? Isn’t it odd that we’re just putting species into mass production without really having any deliberation?

Jennifer, welcome!

Jennifer Jacquet: Thank you for having me.

Margonelli: So one of the questions that is a big operating issue at Issues is how can scientists affect policy? Tell me, what do you study and how did you get involved in octopuses?

Jacquet: I work on the twin problems of climate change and the biodiversity crisis. For my PhD, I focused a lot on fisheries and aquaculture issues within the biodiversity crisis. Ten years ago now, I saw an article about how farming octopuses was going to be the next big thing. It was published in 2014 and the article gave me pause. I remember teaching it in my class and saying, “Look at what’s coming down the pipeline,” and feeling like, “Isn’t it odd that we are not having a public conversation about this? Isn’t it odd that we’re just putting species into mass production without really having any deliberation?”

Thus, the seed was planted and I began working on this issue of octopus farming in part because it felt interesting to work on something that hadn’t gotten off the ground yet as opposed to the other things I work on like trying to keep oil in the ground and dismantle fossil fuel infrastructure and things like that.

Margonelli: So part of this was the challenge of something that wasn’t happening yet. It was a chance to head something off maybe.

Jacquet: Exactly. I felt like it was a very different approach, even policy wise, to the other things I was working on and that gave me momentum.

Margonelli: What did you know about octopuses at that point?

Jacquet: That’s a really good question. I mean, even my own affinity for octopuses at that point especially was hard to explain, but I felt like I knew based on the videos I had seen, the articles that were coming out, Sy Montgomery’s book, The Soul of an Octopus, was published the following year in 2015, that they were not good candidates for mass production, that they were simply too curious, too carnivorous, and too like us to some degree, despite being an invertebrate, to really take to this form of production—not that any animal really takes to it—but they seemed an especially bad candidate.

Margonelli: So you developed essentially two different arguments against octopus farming. One was about them being ill-suited to being put in small octopus cages and the other one had to do with the amount of protein that octopuses need to eat.

Jacquet: Yes. The third actually that we mentioned explicitly in the article in Issues is about the question of food security. Do we really need this to feed the world? So it was both an ecological and animal welfare and the food security argument that we brought together and wove together in this argument.

Margonelli: The ecological argument on the amount of food that octopuses need is they need to eat three times their own weight in other fish and crabs to grow. So, it’s taking all the fish in the sea and converting them into a third of themselves and then harvesting that octopus.

Scientists have been calling since the 1970s to stop putting carnivorous species into mass production, things like Atlantic salmon, because of the demands that they put on wild fish. We actually have to capture fish from the ocean to feed them.

Jacquet: Yes, that’s right. Interestingly, we’re in the midst of this incredible revolution regarding aquaculture—the farming of aquatic fish and invertebrates—in that we have domesticated or put into mass production something like 400 species over the last few decades. A good portion of those species have been carnivorous. Compare that to the 20 or so terrestrial animals that we’ve domesticated over thousands of years, and none of those animals are pure carnivores.

So you already have this real difference between these two farming systems and scientists have been calling since the 1970s to stop putting carnivorous species into mass production, things like Atlantic salmon, because of the demands that they put on wild fish. We actually have to capture fish from the ocean to feed them and, as you say, convert it to this more exotic or luxury product. So, we take anchovies and menhaden, convert them to salmon, and we were going to be taking hake and squid and crabs and converting it to octopuses. This just doesn’t make good ecological sense. There’s a strong scientific argument for this that’s been around for decades.

Margonelli: So you started getting interested in this topic in 2014. Then in 2015, Sy Montgomery’s book, The Soul of the Octopus, came out and people got interested in what’s going on with these octopi and why can they open a jar and things like that, these bigger cool questions about the octopus. Then you started working on a scientific article about it and tell me what happened there.

Jacquet: Yeah, I would just add with Sy’s work as well, most people had seen also incredible footage of octopuses doing interesting things. The whole rise of YouTube and the digital culture had allowed a glimpse at this animal, but both her book and many of those videos showed us what octopuses did in captivity mainly. We began writing an article after, especially this conference on animal consciousness where I spoke and also Peter Godfrey-Smith spoke. He has studied octopuses in the wild, which is very remarkable. I remember speaking with him after the conference and saying, “We need to write something about this.” He agreed. And Becca Franks was also at NYU and she is an animal welfare scientist. I, at that same conference, had met Walter Sanchez-Suarez who was finishing his PhD in animal behavior and is from Spain, which is the country who was making the biggest investment into octopus farming. So, all of that converged on writing up an article making the case against octopus farming that we tried to place in a scientific journal. It had, I think, 50 or 70 scientific references. It was nevertheless a normative argument. Of course, in the title you can hear it—the case against octopus farming—and trying to get this article placed was a challenge in and of itself.

Margonelli: Tell me a little bit about the challenge. What happened? What did people say when they saw it or what did the scientists who were doing the review say?

Jacquet: Yeah, so I sent it to the usual list of suspects where I’ve sent things before, Nature, Proceedings of the Royal Society, Bioscience, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, a number of journals. I got back an endless list of rejections for various reasons. But overwhelmingly, the response was that this seemed unbalanced, that really a scientific article, what it should do would weigh the pros and cons of farming as opposed to making a clear argument against it. I felt that that argument was already tacitly in the literature that actually if you looked, all you saw with regards to octopus farming were scientific attempts to technologically get it off the ground.

There was never a moral justification, but there was a technocratic approach as to how you could farm octopuses. This just felt to me like a totally different conversation that it wasn’t about reviewing that existing literature, but about opening up the conversation beyond what was already there or thinking about what was there with regards to say carnivorous fishes and using some of those scientific arguments to apply to another carnivorous species, which is octopus.

Margonelli: So your question was more like, yeah, maybe we could farm octopuses, but should we? It was this moral question. So, somehow you came to Issues in Science and Technology back in 2018 and it was published in the winter of 2019.

The entire field of aquaculture science is there at the behest of the industry. So, these broader conversations about what should or shouldn’t be farmed felt like they were not happening there.

Jacquet: Yes. I remember one of those journal editors… I mean, I think this is something that stuck with me, saying we should send the argument to an aquaculture journal. I just thought that would be the exact wrong fit in part because the entire field of aquaculture science is there at the behest of the industry. So, these broader conversations about what should or shouldn’t be farmed felt like they were not happening there. I was very fortunate that the editor at the time at Issues liked this argument, liked the idea of the piece, but of course, had to reshape it to fit Issues, which was stripping it in many ways of the many scientific references and changing the overall tone of the article, but I think improving its readability vastly.

Margonelli: So what happened after it was published in Issues? Was there a great clamor for octopus legislation?

Jacquet: There was a deafening silence. I felt like it was an incredible effort on everyone’s part and then it had this splash of next to nothing. But then, just weirdly and I think quite randomly—I’m not even sure how he found it—but Robin McKie from The Guardian asked to write about the argument in May of that year, so months after the Issues article came out. Once The Guardian article came out, the ball really got rolling.

Margonelli: So if I’d come to you in September of 2019 and said, “Hey, five years from now, there’s going to be a Senate bill about this,” what would you have said to me?

Jacquet: Given how much effort I’ve put into many other things with absolutely nothing happening policy-wise, it’s nothing short of a dream come true for me personally, especially to just have this level of attention on octopuses and to see that sometimes where you are and where the public is or where Congress is, is actually pretty strongly aligned. It renewed my faith in the entire process.

Margonelli:

One of the things that happened during this five-year period is that there’s been an incredible amount of octopus scholarship. So, there’s been a lot of science that supports the policy take. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Jacquet: Yes, there have been some really important pieces that came out. Robin Crook’s work from San Francisco State, I believe, people pointed as the definitive piece of evidence that octopuses feel pain. There was a lot of discussion because there was also an enormous campaign launched by Compassionate World Farming that discussed the means of slaughter and the impact that this would have on the animals. It wasn’t peer reviewed work, but it was, I think, very persuasive. Then there was a report published by the London School of Economics talking about how giving octopuses a good life in captivity was virtually impossible.

Margonelli: That report was about sentience. So, it connected the octopus to the concept of sentience and whether they had feelings and then connected that back to the question of farming.

Jacquet: Yes. It was also not exclusively on octopuses, but covered a wide range of invertebrates. So, it was interesting to see octopuses relative to these other species as well.

Margonelli: And then at the same time, there was a cultural movement around octopuses. Do you think that if there had only been the growing science around octopuses that was also being applied to this question of farming… I mean, how important was the whole cultural movement and what was the cultural movement?

This is really a watershed moment for octopuses.

Jacquet: I can say with pretty high confidence that the cultural aspect is enormously important. A number of colleagues and I also worked on a report comparing protections for whales to the protections of tunas to the protections of octopuses. You can really see through those case studies the differences. We have an enormous body of science about tuna and we have next to nothing in terms of protecting them, especially as animals rather than just as fisheries resources. Whales, there was the science happening, there was this enormous cultural momentum. There were civil society groups acting. With octopuses, I really felt like, “Oh, we’re on the precipice of something.”

Then when the film My Octopus Teacher came out in 2020 in the midst of a global pandemic and becomes number one on Netflix and really everyone and their brother seemed to have seen that film, it shatters, I think, a lot of preconceptions about what octopuses want. It shows, I think, for the first time in an incredibly persuasive way that these animals are wild animals and they prefer a wild existence. That what you saw them do in an aquarium—open a lid here or there, escape from one aquarium to another—is dwarfed by their behavior in the wild, by their ability to outwit a shark, by their ability to camouflage and just weave together this narrative around the life of Octopus vulgaris.

The very same species that is being discussed for mass production is the species featured in that movie and then wins the Academy Award. I mean, I think this is really a watershed moment for octopuses.

Margonelli: It’s interesting because what you’re talking about really is taking all of these scientific questions and framing them in ways that the public can engage and think about them ethically. It’s not just octopuses are too smart to be farmed. It’s octopuses in the wild. So, the wild has a specific meaning. There’s specific behaviors attached to it. You have to understand the framing of an octopus in the wild and who they would be as different than an octopus in a tank and then there’s some questions of empathy. I mean, it’s a very complex set of problem framings and understandings and cultural relevance of this animal. It’s a very complex set of things that would be hard to see, I think, in advance.

Jacquet: I think it would be very hard to predict any of that in advance and yet it does look… I don’t want to say identical by any means, but similar to what happened for whales where there really was this shift in global consciousness for this entire group of animals that led to… I mean, I don’t want to say instantaneous, but it was a very rapid change from being a pro-whaling world to an anti-whaling world. I mean the conversation has not gotten to should we kill octopuses in the wild? That is still happening and no one’s really discussing it, but the idea that we should subject these animals to a life of mass production? is being deliberated upon right now. It feels very 2024 to me.

Margonelli: Can you dig into why it feels so specifically 2024?

That has been what we’ve done to nature over the course of the Anthropocene. If we can get out of that with octopuses, maybe we can undo it in other ways too.

Jacquet: We are blindly walking down this road of domesticating aquatic species without talking much about it. Here is an animal that really has captured, I’d say, the imaginations and the hearts of the public and seeing who this animal is in the wild makes you go, “We can’t do this to this animal. There’s no reason to do this to animal right now.” I feel that entire exercise is just so healthy given how many changes and the kind of shift in perspective that we need to actually transform society right now to be compatible with ecological limits and to live in some agreement with nature.

I want to say there is a little bit of an analog to the whale conversation yet I think this conversation is still completely new because it’s not about just us going out and killing things, which we’ve done for thousands of years. It’s about, “Do we want to subject them to domestication, to our whims alone, to completely instrumental value? That they have no other value besides that value?” That has been what we’ve done to nature over the course of the Anthropocene. If we can get out of that with octopuses, maybe we can undo it in other ways too.

Margonelli: It’s interesting too because it’s only possible in this particular information environment that we find ourselves in. As you mentioned, it partly has to do with the pandemic and people being able to watch things on YouTube and the growing popularity of octopuses then driving octopus research in the science and then that feeding into popular culture, which then continues to drive the research. So, you have this interesting octopus singularity here going on.

Jacquet: Yeah, the prediction with the circle of moral empathy is we’ll go to chimpanzees, we’ll go to marine mammals, and then the octopus is just a complete… It is a mollusk. We really could care less about so many of its cousins in terms of bivalves, oysters, whatever. Yet we are like, “No, we need to stop and start talking about this animal.” That’s also really interesting to me. It’s really undoing, I think, very traditional views of what is commonly referred to as the great chain of being, our moral priorities vis-a-vis other species.

Margonelli: So let’s move away from the mollusks and talk about the solitary scientist who starts out trying to figure out how to build a movement. Did you have an eye towards building a movement when you started in 2019 or so?

Jacquet: My level of ambition almost always exceeds whatever happens in real life. So, yes, I had a vision. I mean, my vision involves no octopus farming for the rest of eternity and we are not there yet, but my greatest ambition at the time when the article came out or when we were started talking about it among some actors in civil society in New York City, where I was, was a city-level ban on octopus farming. I don’t think I set out to build a movement, but I was very driven on this issue and felt that anybody who wanted to talk about octopuses, I would talk to them at any time. I kept trying to persuade students, lawyers, some people I knew in city government to take the issue seriously whenever you have their ear. I kept taking up opportunities.

So when Compassionate World Farming, which we mentioned before, they launched a campaign against octopus farming, which is great. They’re a European group. Again, the farm that’s slated for the Canary Islands, which is a Spanish-owned island off of Africa. They were wanting to contact all the MPs in Brussels, and they said, “A letter would be really helpful if we had one.” I was in the middle of summer. I remember I had my new daughter and was supposed to be spending time with my in-laws, and instead I was writing up a letter of support for what they were interested in and decided to get it published. We published that in Animal Sentience and we had over 100 signatories on that.

There is no octopus farming lobby because there is no octopus farming yet. It felt like maybe if we could get there and have that conversation that people would still be sensible on things, that it wouldn’t be just about power. It would actually be a citizens conversation.

I would say what it took from my side was a willingness to drop everything when the moment called for it. Not everybody has that ability or motivation necessarily. So, I’d say that is a challenge, but again, I feel so fortunate and propelled by octopuses themselves that it doesn’t take much to get people moving. Just a quick fast forward is just earlier this year, the first bill actually passed in Washington State. It was introduced last year, and these just passionate people got the bill introduced Washington State. It’s really impressive what they were doing. They reached out to me. I said, “Of course, I’ll testify.” I attended. I spent an hour. I had two daughters, so I had to get the other daughter a babysitter in order to attend this meeting. Then I didn’t even get to testify.

There was no time. It was all taken up by the talk of wolves and livestock. They gave octopuses one minute at the end and I thought, “Okay, this seems really hopeless.” Honestly, the people who were helping sponsor the bill thought it seemed hopeless too. Nevertheless, it passed and it just started gaining momentum. Then lo and behold, earlier this year, it’s signed into law by the Governor of Washington State. Now just last week, we see the octopus bill in California passed 36 to zero. I mean just zero opposition.

This was another thing that I always had felt deep down in my grappling with environmental policy in the United States. There are such enormous forces of obstruction now. There’s such a planned counter-movement to any regulation, but there is no octopus farming lobby because there is no octopus farming yet. It felt like maybe if we could get there and have that conversation that people would still be sensible on things, that it wouldn’t be just about power. It would actually be a citizens conversation.

Seeing that 36 to zero in California just gave me, again, such renewed faith that if it wasn’t for the way that these vested interests have worked out how to own our political system over the last four decades, that we would be in much better shape as a country. Now, the bill’s in Hawaii. Now, we have the national legislation as you’ve mentioned. I’m talking next week to more people in Europe trying to get the ball rolling over there. I’m just hopeful.

Margonelli: Okay, so let’s talk just a little bit about the role of letters signed by scientists because you did have a piece. You did have a signed letter in Animal Sentience that was in response to what was going on in the EU. But after the Octopus Act was proposed by Senators Whitehouse and Lisa Murkowski in July, you then went out and worked with a group of nearly 100 scientists to pull together another letter that was published in Science in mid-August.

Jacquet: Those are mostly North American scholars, not entirely, but also Sy Montgomery joined the letter. It was wonderful to have a lot. I tried to get a lot more octopus-oriented people involved. Jennifer Mather, really renowned octopus behavioralist and biologist, signed the letter as well. That was heartening. Now, the question is how that builds momentum or whether or not it will build any momentum through Congress. So, we have a similar letter, the same content, but a different format that actually will go to Congress. I think you ask a really important question, does that matter? I think it’s really hard to know what matters, honestly.

So, as I say, whenever I’ve been called upon, I try to answer that call. Whether or not it’s talking to a potential staffer or congressperson who’s interested, whether it’s talking to an NGO interested in getting something off the ground, whether it’s writing a letter of support. I feel like it’s an any and all of the above and it’s really hard to know what makes the final difference. As you say, maybe it’s Craig Foster and My Octopus Teacher at the end of the day.

Margonelli: Or the charismatic mollusk, the octopus itself. My last question is you raised a really interesting question about this because there actually isn’t a working octopus farm yet and it hasn’t happened. So, on the one hand, that allowed you to have a discussion purely about the morality of it and the ethics of it and its potential role in sustainable food systems. You’re able to have a clear conversation without different power players being involved. But at the same time, I think Senator Whitehouse said, “It would preemptively prevent this farm from taking place.”

In a sense, it’s going to prevent certain avenues of innovation. Other people have said it’ll prevent certain types of investment, all of which is great if you don’t want octopus farms, but there’s both a genius to legislation that prevents certain kinds of potentially harmful innovation and perhaps we should use it more, but at the same time, there’s a scariness to it because it could potentially limit certain other kinds of innovation and investment that could be very helpful and it could be used by people to prevent things that they don’t want. I just wondered, you’ve been thinking about this over the years. What do you think about that? How do you slice that?

We’ve been dragged into this without having a conversation, without the public really being on board, and with an enormous amount of public investment. Maybe if we started to have these conversations sooner, we would come to agreement about really the world we want to live in.

Jacquet: Well, I guess I see it a little more that it starts even long before that legislation’s introduced in the sense that the European Union and the Spanish government have already made these enormous investments into octopus farming. It was a technological problem for a long time of getting the larval octopuses to grow, of reducing cannibalism. While there isn’t any commercial octopus farming, there are lots of experimental farms out there and there’s been lots of taxpayer investment in this, I think, without strong scientific conversation or public discourse around whether or not this is the right or wrong use of our public money. I think if the conversation that happened actually at that stage, it would’ve been even better because we could have made different kinds of investments into more sustainable aquaculture, into aquaculture that would feed the world and into maybe cellular octopus that could be cloned and grown in a lab that wouldn’t involve any octopus individuals or into plant-based octopus products.

I don’t see this as limiting innovation. If anything, I feel like we’ve been dragged into this without having a conversation, without the public really being on board, and with an enormous amount of public investment. Maybe if we started to have these conversations sooner, we would come to agreement about really the world we want to live in. So, I don’t see this as limiting actually. I see it as opening up saying, “You know what? The public is really not in favor of this form of production, but here are these other options that we could explore.” Maybe we always should have had a more diverse portfolio of investments when it came to aquaculture because this kind of, “Oh, people will pay a lot of money for octopuses. All right, we should farm octopuses” to me was not the deliberate, slow thinking that we really count on the government and scientists to be having.

So, I actually see it as much more a disappointment with the early part of this stage than a fear about what’s happening currently. I feel like what’s happening currently is trying to address the problem of not having had those conversations sooner.

Margonelli: To wrap up, I’m curious, do you have your eye on another animal or another issue that you’re really thinking about?

Jacquet: Well, not to scare people too much, but I really think that octopuses are a kind of umbrella species for the aquaculture conversation generally, because again, we have done work. Becca Franks led the work showing that we’ve jumped into this mass production of aquatic species, over 400 again compared to the 20 or so domesticated terrestrially. We know next to nothing about these animals in terms of anything and almost nothing in terms of their welfare, how to give them a good life in captivity.

I think that there’s reason to put the brakes on what’s happening with aquaculture right now in general and rethink it and re-strategize with a greater amount of deliberation with more kinds of people, lawyers, concerned citizens, widening the number of stakeholders people say, beyond aquaculture science, which again, has been very much about serving the industry and making money to say, “What does this industry look like moving forward?”

So I certainly see the octopuses as opening of a door to that conversation. I have a lot of other unrealistic pipe dreams aside from that. But I continue to work on octopuses, of course, because of them, because of who they are, because of the issues we’ve talked about, but again, also because I see them as some guidepost for the aquaculture conversation as a whole.

Margonelli: This has been an incredible conversation, not just about octopuses, but also about how to use science to create social change. If this podcast inspired you to learn more about octopuses, go to issues.org to read Jennifer’s piece, The Case Against Octopus Farming, and you can visit our show notes to learn more about her work on aquaculture conservation.

Please subscribe to The Ongoing Transformation wherever you get your podcasts and write to us about anything, especially octopus facts, at [email protected]. Thanks to our podcast producer Kimberly Quach and our audio engineer Shannon Lynch. I’m Lisa Margonelli, editor-in-chief at Issues.

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Cite this Article

Jacquet, Jennifer and Lisa Margonelli. “How the Octopus Got to the Senate.” Issues in Science and Technology (October 8, 2024).