64 Time Sept. 2–9, 2019
My father, who taught biology at Middlebury College
in Vermont, sporadically hosted a lunch for his class,
to which he would bring an assortment of inverte-
brates. Students would discuss each specimen, iden-
tify its various parts and then eat it. That year, my dad
brought home leftovers for dinner. He reached into a
plastic bag, pulled out a grayish-pink gelatinous blob,
put it on our kitchen table, and cut the eight- tentacled,
poorly cooked creature into portions. It tasted like
salty bubble gum, and my sister and I spat it out.
Twenty years later, I went to Mexico’s Yucatán
Peninsula to meet Carlos Rosas, a biologist who aims
to revolutionize how those gelatinous blobs wind up
on dinner tables.
People are now eating more octopus than ever:
annual global production has more than doubled
since 1980, from roughly 180,000 tons to about
370,000 tons. But overfishing has already caused the
collapse of multiple wild-octopus fisheries around
the world, and current populations likely face similar
threats. Rosas believes inland aquaculture—raising
the animals from birth to adulthood in captivity—
could be one way to meet increased demand without
devastating the wild population. The approach has
been tried with a variety of other marine animals,
such as shrimp, salmon and tilapia, but octopuses
have remained a stubbornly vexing puzzle. However,
as the stability of wild populations has become more
uncertain and the economic stakes have risen, teams
in Spain, Japan and elsewhere around the world have
also made significant progress on the surprisingly
complex science behind octopus rearing.
Critics find the prospect of cultivating such sen-
tient animals for food barbaric. They point out that
research shows the animals are highly intelligent, ex-
hibiting complex behaviors incompatible with the
enclosed environments of aquaculture. Rosas argues
that it may actually be the best way to protect the
species over the long term. And, hovering between
a prototype and commercial scale, he’s at the fore-
front of the increasingly intense quest to build the
world’s first octopus farm.
The egg-incubation room of Rosas’ lab, perched at
the edge of the Gulf of Mexico, on the National Au-
tonomous University of Mexico campus in the Yuca-
tán town of Sisal, is dark and cool, lit with a dim red
light. “We maintain more or less the temperature and
the light that the animals experience in the ocean,”
said Rosas, illuminating the space with a headlamp.On a rack inside was the product of nearly 20 years’
work of scientific research: 24 plastic containers
filled with seawater and hundreds of octopus eggs.
The eggs resemble tiny bunches of white grapes on
the vine. In the wild, spawning females attach these
egg strings to the roofs of their dens, where they dan-
gle like fragile stalactites.
“They’re hatching,” said Rosas, who, despite hav-
ing seen this hundreds, if not thousands, of times,
still sounded giddy. “You’re a lucky man.” The
Octopus maya babies were about the size of a fin-
gernail and translucent. Little tentacles wisped out
behind them as they squirted around the enclosure.
A few were even taking their cautious first steps up
the plastic sides.The YucaTán’s TradiTional octopus-fishing
season runs from August to December. When the
weather is calm, thousands of fishermen leave their
homes before dawn and head for the water. To reduce
costs, the men form groups, lashing together their
small individual boats, called alijos, into pontoons
and sharing one motor per team.
When they arrive at the day’s fishing spot, the
fishermen disperse. Each alijo is equipped with
long wooden sticks called jimbas, to which the fish-
erman attaches his lines, baited with a soft-shell
crab. The alijo drifts with the current, dragging the
bait along the ocean floor. When a hungry octopus
catches sight of the passing crab, it attacks, wrapping
its arms tightly around its prize, hanging on as the
fisherman reels in the string. If the fisherman can’t
immediately wrest the octopus off the line, he pokes
it in the eye with his finger.
Whether by accident or design, the chief merit
of the jimba technique is its built-in ecological safe-
guard. When a female octopus is ready to lay her
eggs, she first finds a place to hide—caves, coral or
some other ocean cavity. Sometimes she decorates
her lair with stones and shells. Here she deposits
her eggs for the only time in her one-to-two-year
life, and protects them fiercely. She doesn’t come
out and doesn’t eat. A passing jimba-drawn crab,
then, is of no interest. Neither mother nor babies
are at risk.
Fishing with jimba is the only legal way to catch
octopuses in the Yucatán, but the industry is un-
evenly regulated. While the government prescribes
a quota, understaffed authorities can’t keep accu-
rate count or adequately prevent illegal fishing. That
means the sector has been left more or less in the
hands of the fishermen themselves. Given the imme-
diate financial pressures, many locals fear Mexico’s
octopus fisheries could follow the example of most
others in the world, where massive trawling nets
sweep through the ocean, indiscriminately haul-
ing up octopuses of all genders and ages without
regard for the ecological fallout.Science
I first laid eyes
on an octopus
when I was 8.