Morocco, for example, was once the larg-
est octopus supplier in the world. In 2000, the
country caught a staggering 99,400 tons. But,
by 2004, overfishing had caused that to plum-
met to 19,200 tons. Other countries have since
taken up the octopus-production mantle. Accord-
ing to the latest reliable data, from 2014, China
had far and away the largest octopus catch—
120,000 tons (as recently as 2000, the coun-
try produced a mere 4.6 tons). Japan and Mexico,
2014’s second and third largest producers, hauled
in 35,000 tons and 34,000 tons, respectively.
When rosas Was a Teenager in the early 1970s,
he built his first aquarium in his parents’ garage. He
and a friend from down the block sold guppies to
other children in their Mexico City neighborhood.
Rosas’ love of sea creatures lured him into a
biology program at the national university, which
in turn led to a doctorate, and a dissertation on
rearing crabs—a practice in its nascent stages at the
time. Before he could make much headway, though,
the country shifted its resources to shrimp, which
the government saw as the next frontier of Mexican
aquaculture. On a shoestring budget, Rosas and his
colleagues created what he calls a “very primitive
laboratory” with secondhand equipment in a dirt-
floor building. They gathered water for the lab by
paddling a rickety boat out into the ocean, allowing
it to sink slightly, and hauling back whatever the
vessel could carry. The makeshift operation, he
says, produced some of Mexico’s first captive-
raised shrimp. But the triumph was short-lived, as
bigger and better -funded operations quickly blew
past their limited production capabilities. Bored
and in search of a new project, Rosas learned that
the local government on the Yucatán Peninsula was
looking for someone to explore octopus aquaculture.
In 2003, Rosas moved his operations to the lab at
Sisal and began reading everything he could about
the subject. Progress was slow, but he was captivated.
“For me, it was a new girlfriend,” Rosas says. José
Iglesias, a Spanish octopus expert, remembers an
early visit to the lab with a laugh: “He didn’t know
anything.”
In all fairness, scientists have long struggled with
octopus farming. Many species, including Octopus
vulgaris, the common octopus, hatch into a paralar-
val stage, in which they have stubby, almost non-
existent arms and float around like plankton. They
drift through the water column and suck up whatever
microscopic food they can as they grow toward adult-
hood, when they will eventually settle on the bottom
of the sea. For years, replicating these early phases
of life in a laboratory proved impossible.
The first major breakthrough came in 1962, when
Japanese scientist Kouzo Itami and his team raised
vulgaris hatchlings until the larvae grew old enough
to settle on the tank floor. While the abysmal 9%
survival rate was far from commercially viable, this
is widely considered the first successful attempt to
raise octopuses from birth.
It took until 2004 for the next major advancement
in the field, when Iglesias’ lab in Spain announced it
had raised vulgaris through their full life cycle, this
time with a survival rate of 31.5%. Although more
than triple Itami’s rate, it was still far from market-
able. The animals were just too finicky. Small fluc-
tuations in temperature, dissolved oxygen levels or
salinity—among a multitude of other factors —can be
deadly (not to mention the cannibalism). But Rosas
says that given enough resources, the challenges are
surmountable. “With money,” he says, “in one year
it could be solved.”
One of Rosas’ crucial advantages is that he works
with Octopus maya, not vulgaris. The maya species
skips the paralarval stage and is born as essentially a
miniature adult, making it significantly hardier. But
feeding the babies is still the largest remaining hur-
dle in octopus aquaculture.
Back in Sisal, Rosas took me to a room adja-
cent to the incubator and lifted the top of a cooler.
Inside was his latest solution to this challenge: rows^
Rosas by one of
the 24 octopus
containers at his
lab in Mexico’s
Yucatán Peninsula