The world wants to eat more octopus. Is farming them ethical?
Both highly intelligent and a culinary delicacy, the animals are at the center of a controversy that pits the conservation of wild octopuses against the ethics of mass-breeding them.
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. He coaxes its wary occupant out onto his hand. 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. 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. “Maravilloso!” he murmurs.
Around the world, octopuses have long been objects of desire and wonder. Now they’re becoming an ethical flashpoint, as researchers like Rosas puzzle out ways
