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A recently proposed aquaculture octopus farm in the Canary Islands , which means almost 275,000 individual octopuses will be killed annually.

My research examines animal minds and ethics, and to me, the phrase "octopus culture" brings to mind , two communities of wild octopuses in Jarvis Bay, Australia.

In Octopolis, numerous octopuses share—and fight over—a few square meters of seabed. In these watery towns, octopuses form dominance hierarchies, and they've started developing new behaviors: male octopuses fight over territory and, perhaps, females by and .

Octopus community-building

The discovery of octopus communities came as a surprise to biologists who have long described octopuses as solitary animals that interact with others in three specific contexts: .

What Octopolis suggests can happen in the wild is what has also been observed in captive octopuses: when living in an overly dense captive environment, .

In their fights for power, male octopuses perform , including throwing scallop shells to defend their den, and the "mantle up" display which makes an octopus look like a . Submissive octopuses signal their compliance with light colors and flattened body postures. For their efforts, the dominants appear to gain better access to high-quality dens and to females.

Animal culture

What is going on in Octopolis and Octlantis is properly called octopus culture. The idea of emerged after scientists noticed that in some groups, animals perform actions that aren't seen in other groups of the same species.

One of the earliest proponents of animal cultures was the Japanese primatologist who in the 1950s observed that .

This was a new behavior, not seen in other macaque groups, and observers were lucky enough to observe its origins. A monkey named Imo was the first to wash a potato in the salty water and others soon copied her, leading to a community-wide behavior pattern.

The idea of animal culture drove much subsequent Japanese primatology, but in Europe and North America culture didn't get much attention until 1999, when an article . Since then, evidence of culture—group-typical behaviors that are socially learned—has been found .

A new kind of octopus

The proposal to start an octopus farm is a proposal to create a new octopus culture, because when cultural animals are brought together, they can't help but create society. It's also a proposal to create a new kind of octopus: the cultural behaviors coupled with the captive environment will be a novel environmental niche that shapes subsequent evolution.

Our familiar farmed animals—like Angus cows and Chocktaw hogs— and are entirely different from the animals they evolved from.

Many of our domesticated animals cannot survive without human care. Examples include , that have evolved without the instincts and coloring wild rabbits have to protect them from predators, and .

Starting an octopus farm is a commitment to creating a new kind of animal that relies on humans for their existence. It isn't an idea to be taken up lightly, or a project that can responsibly be attempted and then discarded when it turns out to be too difficult or not profitable.

Managing octopus populations

There are many reasons to worry that an octopus farm will not be easy to manage. Unlike other farmed animals, octopuses need their space. Octopolis is already a battleground of boxing octopuses; one can only wonder what that will look like on a scale of thousands.

Octopuses are sentient—they are . A recent report commissioned by the reviewed the scientific evidence for pain experience in cephalopod mollusks (octopuses, squid and cuttlefish).

Sentient animals used for food are protected under welfare laws and killed in ways that should minimize their pain. Current methods of slaughtering octopuses include clubbing, slicing open the brain or suffocating them. The report's authors conclude that none of these methods of slaughter are humane .

Octopuses are . The kind of housing needed to shelter them will be difficult to achieve, especially while also providing enrichment, since an enriched environment will be one full of possible getaway routes.

If an octopus farm is started, and then abandoned, the thousands of domesticated cultural octopuses cannot be released into the sea and be expected to flourish. We learned from the many expensive attempts to release Keiko, the killer whale that starred in the ", that successful reintroduction of captive cultural animals into the wild is not easy. Even after spending US$20 million dollars, .

The proposal to bring thousands of animals together into an octopus megacity would scale octopus culture far beyond anything found in nature or in captivity. It would create hundreds of thousands of Keikos, aquatic cultural animals captured from the wild and brought into captivity. And it would force them to live together and create a new culture in what is sure to be a violent octopus slum.

Just now, we are learning that octopuses and have culture, and we are starting to .

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