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A seafood firm wants to farm octopus. Activists say they're too smart for that

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Re: A seafood firm wants to farm octopus. Activists say they're too smart for that

#51
We know that octopuses and many other animals are intelligent. We don't know for certain if anything nonhuman is sentient. Scientists and activist groups have been designing frameworks for sentience and tests to measure it.

This paper [1] (about crabs, but discusses octopuses) has a very interesting section talking about defining and measuring sentience. It was used to support a recent bill in the UK [2] attempting to reduce cruelty to sentient animals. Octopuses measured very high in their testing.

[1] https://www.lse.ac.uk/News/News-Assets/PDFs/2021/Sentience-i...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Welfare_(Sentience)_Act...

Re: A seafood firm wants to farm octopus. Activists say they're too smart for that

#52
post #45

The older I get, the less I want anything sentient on my plate.

I on other hand am still saddened at this age that I can't get dog or cat meat here...

I'm genuinely curious, is this just edgy humour, or is there any culture that regularly eats cat?

Re: A seafood firm wants to farm octopus. Activists say they're too smart for that

#54
post #35
post #13

The real problem is that nearly all seafood is unsustainable. Even when using euphemisms like 'farms' make us thing it's somewhat contained to one place and we just throw them some food pellets manufactured from vegetables in another factory. The reality of salmon farms for instance is that for every 1kg of farmed Salmon it takes 20kg of wild fish to feed them to maturity.

This 20kg figure sounds wildly inaccurate. Fish feed is in general 75% plantbased. It is also very efficient (in terms of conversion rate to growth). Could this 20kg figure be decades old?

This seems to be a very generalized statement when there is a lot of variation to consider. There are 33,000 fish species, some being specialized feeders of algae, to 100% live fish, all designed for processing each food differently. Are you speaking on a specific fish that is commonly "farmed"? I could see Salmon needing this 20kg and not even contain the quality fats they get in the wild, resulting in a lower quality food on top of being more impactful to the environment.

Re: A seafood firm wants to farm octopus. Activists say they're too smart for that

#56
post #14

I visited an experimental octopus farm in Hawaii once, expecting to come away feeling guilty about eating octopus since I had heard so much about how smart they are. It ended up having the opposite effect, since I learned that they only live 2 years and aren't social creatures. This is opposite of every other intelligent creature that we know of, and so I'm extremely skeptical of claims of their intelligence. They mi…

If this was on the big island, it was recently shut down. We were there two years ago and it was really interesting...

https://weanimalsmedia.org/2023/09/08/octopus-farm-closes-fo...

Re: A seafood firm wants to farm octopus. Activists say they're too smart for that

#57
post #52
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I on other hand am still saddened at this age that I can't get dog or cat meat here...

I'm genuinely curious, is this just edgy humour, or is there any culture that regularly eats cat?

Is it really any different from any other animal? So why would it not have possibility to be on plate? After all one of my life bucket lists is to taste as many species as possible...

Re: A seafood firm wants to farm octopus. Activists say they're too smart for that

#58
post #52
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I on other hand am still saddened at this age that I can't get dog or cat meat here...

I'm genuinely curious, is this just edgy humour, or is there any culture that regularly eats cat?

https://www.chinasmack.com/boiled-alive-cat-prepared-served-...

Re: A seafood firm wants to farm octopus. Activists say they're too smart for that

#59
post #13

The real problem is that nearly all seafood is unsustainable. Even when using euphemisms like 'farms' make us thing it's somewhat contained to one place and we just throw them some food pellets manufactured from vegetables in another factory. The reality of salmon farms for instance is that for every 1kg of farmed Salmon it takes 20kg of wild fish to feed them to maturity.

There's a lot of shit ton of algaes blooming due to climate change. Wonder if that can be sourced as protein / feed.

Metabolically, animals are pretty inefficient, and each trophic level (layer of the food web) only keeps about 10% of its caloric intake as edible flesh for the next layer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_efficiency#Ten_perc...).

So if algae feed smaller fish, the smaller fish feed salmon, and the salmon feed humans, to double our salmon, we'd need 20 units of smaller fish and 200 units of algae (edit: oops, math is hard).

That's a lot. Climate change can increase algae productivity, but not by that much unless we want to barbecue the world. Of course there are other avenues (like simply harvesting more of it, or growing crops in areas of land/ocean not suitable for other uses). But there are always knock-on effects too, like algae blooms can be poisonous or deplete nutrients in an area.

The on-land agricultural revolution and improved/modified genetics gave us access to much more edible food, but a lot of that is only 1-2 trophic levels (we eat grains directly or feed grains to livestock that we then eat). The ocean tends to have a lot more layers, and is also not as easy for us to till and fertilize, and not all of it is equal... much of the edible parts are concentrated in certain areas, with a lot of empty water in between.

In general we probably shouldn't be hunting apex predators in the ocean anymore than we hunt them on land. It took 'em millions of years of evolution to reach a relatively stable carrying capacity, but we can drive them to extinction in a few years.

But, hell, realistically there's probably no stopping any of this. One day our kids will read about whales alongside dodos in the history books =/

Re: A seafood firm wants to farm octopus. Activists say they're too smart for that

#60
post #35
post #13

The real problem is that nearly all seafood is unsustainable. Even when using euphemisms like 'farms' make us thing it's somewhat contained to one place and we just throw them some food pellets manufactured from vegetables in another factory. The reality of salmon farms for instance is that for every 1kg of farmed Salmon it takes 20kg of wild fish to feed them to maturity.

This 20kg figure sounds wildly inaccurate. Fish feed is in general 75% plantbased. It is also very efficient (in terms of conversion rate to growth). Could this 20kg figure be decades old?

Also the non plant parts of it could be fairly efficient too. e.g see black soldier fly farming for fish feed. Not that that is a 100% answer for all feed for seafood farming, but interesting options abound.

Personally though, Octopi are too smart for me to eat. I'll always pass on it now.

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