Balancing on a railroad-tie-size beam of a platform floating in Spain’s Vigo Bay, Ricardo Tur crouches and points below. Dangling several feet underwater is a pen the size of a garden shed, home to 80 octopuses.
I squat too, hoping to glimpse even a single arm—there are 640 of them down there! In my excitement, I lean too far and almost fall in.
Tur is a marine biologist who for the past decade has been feeding the octopuses on this batea, the Spanish term for the 65-foot-by-82-foot raft I’m on. The raft’s owner, Carlos Veiga, a short, fit 75-year-old who has fished the planet’s oceans since the Franco era, stands nearby. Around us in this inlet, which contains Europe’s busiest fishing port, are nearly 500 more bateas, primarily devoted to mussel farming. But Veiga’s raft tends to a far more complicated creature. It is the world’s oldest continuously operated aquaculture farm for Octopus vulgaris, the common octopus. No reporter has ever been aboard before.
The Spanish government granted Veiga’s fishing co-op, the Samertolameu Pot Fishers Association, an experimental license in 1998 to fatten up around 2,000 wild-caught octopuses per year. Veiga and his fellow fishermen retain permission to capture young adults, house them in shelters made of PVC pipe, and feed them fishing discards and special octopus food through a yellow tube that snakes down from the surface. Veiga tells me that the animals 5 feet below us are a month old. Once they’ve reached 6 pounds, in another two months or so, Samertolameu can sell them—for about $45 each on a good day—at Vigo’s daily fish auction.
It would be nice to see them. But three decades of trial and error have taught Veiga and Tur that if cages are hung higher, there is too much light, and rainfall dilutes the salinity. Also, thieves can get ideas. Wholesale prices for large octopus in Europe have climbed to almost $8 per pound, double what they were in early 2021, FAO Globefish data show. (Shrimp and salmon prices are relatively unchanged.)
Demand for octopus is soaring. Global catches climbed from fewer than 35,000 tons back in 1950 to 375,000 tons in recent years, pushing the first-sale fish market to between $6 billion and $8 billion annually. Once a delicacy for adventurous eaters, octopus now appears on menus across the globe: mesquite-grilled for Texas barbecue, sliced for Japanese sushi, folded into Mexico City tacos, and sun-dried on the Mediterranean coast.
The surge has put intense pressure on wild stocks. Following a 400,000-ton catch in 2017, the decade’s largest, governments began to enact fishing bans. This summer, the octopus fishery in Galicia, where Veiga’s batea is also based, shut for three months so that populations could recover. Portugal instituted its own restrictions in August. In September, Morocco, the leading producer after China, halted catches until year’s end.
As a solution, many in the industry are starting to embrace the once unfathomable-sounding scheme of farming octopus commercially. If octopus can be scaled at the rate of previous fish species, it’s estimated that an additional 20,000 tons per year could be produced from farming by late next decade. That may not sound like a lot, but it equals the annual Octopus vulgaris catch for all of Europe in recent years, and it’s likely to grow. Whoever gets there first will be primed to take the spoils from a brand-new value chain, potentially worth $1 billion per year from farm to plate.
If it can be done, octopus would be the first new farmed animal protein to hit the market in half a century—since salmon was first commercially raised in the 1970s—capping off a marathon quest unlike any in modern aquaculture. For decades, farming octopus was believed to be impossible. It requires feeding a predator in captivity, putting animals that traditionally live alone in communal cages, and drastically improving a wild survival rate that ranks among nature’s worst: At best, one in every 1 million Octopus vulgaris eggs reaches maturity.
Six years ago, Tur—then technical director at the Pescanova Biomarine Center, run by Spanish seafood conglomerate Nueva Pescanova—and a colleague from the Spanish Institute of Oceanography, Pedro Domingues, pulled it off. They captively bred a lab-born male Octopus vulgaris, Goliath, with a lab-born female named Lourditas (after the French holy site Lourdes, where water supposedly performs miracles). Five generations of offspring kept reproducing. Veiga’s batea supplied breeding stock to the Pescanova Biomarine Center so that it could start additional generations; the young octopuses consumed a special feed in the lab, then some of them matured back on Veiga’s batea.
“After decades of research at different centers and companies around the world,” Nueva Pescanova announced in July 2019, its team had “successfully closed the octopus reproduction cycle in aquaculture.” Its next step would be building the world’s first industrial-scale octopus farm, in the Canary Islands, to raise octopuses for consumption. Then-CEO Ignacio Gutierrez promised that consumers would see “farmed octopus starting in 2023.”
The announcement outraged animal rights activists, all the way up to Jane Goodall, who found the idea abhorrent. But the shock rippled beyond typical activist circles as well. Octopuses are, after all, among the most mysterious and otherworldly creatures on the planet, popularly associated with exceptional cunning and skill. Nueva Pescanova’s plans raised red flags even for meat eaters, igniting a debate about whether these cephalopods should be farmed at all (more on this later).
At the same time, Nueva Pescanova’s own business entered a rocky stretch: three straight years of profit declines that culminated in 2024 with a $145 million decrease in revenue year over year. Tur’s octopus team was gutted. The Canary Islands government called for deeper environmental-impact studies before the farm could be built.
When Nueva Pescanova’s plan appeared to run aground, many assumed the effort to cultivate octopuses had too. But as Fast Company discovered in Vigo, the work continues. The original team of Tur, Domingues, and Veiga has regrouped under a new banner; they are now looking for corporate backing. New companies have entered the race, including at least two other Spanish seafood purveyors and Japanese fast-food chain Tsukiji Gindaco (which sells takoyaki—fried octopus balls—at Los Angeles’s Dodger Stadium).
There is a remarkable sense of urgency among them. With global octopus catch levels plateauing and demand swelling, some company is likely to figure out how to farm them. (Multiple scientists I spoke with assume that China could even be doing it already.) And the prize will be about more than just money.
What’s happening in Vigo today could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get it right—to establish rules from the outset that prioritize welfare, ecological responsibility, and food security for a growing world population. As the world has seen with industrial pork, chicken, and cattle farms, when cruel practices become entrenched, they’re hard to reform. And they rarely stop people from eating meat.
No food choice is without consequences.
Vigo, perched on Spain’s northwestern coast, has a credible claim as World Octopus Capital. A statue of Jules Verne with octopus legs dominates the harbor, eight-legged murals overtake building walls, and graffiti on the main plaza reads DON’T EAT ME below an octopus flipping the bird. An hour’s drive inland, a decades-old festival serves the planet’s largest platter of octopus every year. Centuries ago, coastal fishermen paid tithes to monasteries in octopus. Today, Vigo is home to several of Spain’s biggest seafood conglomerates, including Nueva Pescanova.
In Vigo’s Old Town, Tur and I sit at a table inside Tapería O Canario, a block from his apartment. Before us lies an array of prawns, squid, gooseneck barnacles, and pulpo a la gallega, the Galician staple of boiled octopus, cut with scissors, drizzled with oil, dusted with paprika, and eaten with wood picks.
In 2021, O Canario became the first restaurant to serve captive-born octopus, a descendant of Lourditas, to Tur and a few other Nueva Pescanova executives. It had been hatched at the Biomarine Center, fattened in a Nueva Pescanova pen, then prepared six different ways.
Before he ran Nueva Pescanova’s aquaculture R&D, Tur, 41, spent a decade studying marine life around the world: invasive starfish feeding on sea urchins in the Mediterranean, tuna in the Indian Ocean aboard a vessel once hijacked by pirates (before Tur joined), and toothfish in Antarctica. These experiences offered a firsthand lesson in the food system’s fragility: Toothfish, an enormous snaggletoothed predator rebranded in the 1970s as “Chilean sea bass,” now fetches as much as $70 a pound, fueling overfishing and poaching.
Seafood is Earth’s most consumed animal protein. Humans caught or farmed 200 million tons of it in 2025, compared with 150 million tons of poultry, according to an estimate by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a global policy forum founded in 1961. Overexploitation and marine mismanagement have pushed fisheries to their biological limits, leaving very little room to catch more seafood sustainably. But because global human population is expected to reach 10 billion by 2050, the planet will, in fact, need more seafood: Demand is expected to double by then.
“Without aquaculture, it will be impossible to feed the world’s growing population,” explains Ángel Matamoro, an industry veteran who spent six years as Nueva Pescanova’s chief corporate sustainability officer. In its latest annual report, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization declared that wild-caught seafood has officially been eclipsed in global production by farmed seafood. Some 70% percent of salmon now comes from farms.
Only a handful of species have defied ongoing attempts at large-scale commercial farming: squid, eels, deep-sea crustaceans like lobsters, some large fish such as bluefin tuna. But wild squid are plentiful. Eels have a small market. Lobster is a luxury. Tuna simply requires too much space.
For decades, attempts to farm these eight-legged animals—the common octopus in the Mediterranean, the western rock octopus in Australia, the Patagonian red octopus in Chile—had sputtered. In 2017, after scientists from Japan’s Nissui Corp., owner of frozen-seafood brand Gorton’s, artificially incubated eggs, the company boasted that it would be selling farmed Octopus sinensis in grocery stores within three years.
In a world obsessed with protein and anxious about fat and cholesterol, octopus could be the ultimate catch. It’s leaner than chicken, high in amino acids, offers 75% of its calories in the form of protein, and is almost entirely edible. It grows fast, takes up little space, produces relatively little waste—and fetches top dollar. One could easily imagine lots of companies processing it into the kinds of palatable “octobites” now being sold to L.A. Dodgers fans.
Octopuses are marvels of mechanical engineering and masters of using their problem-solving skills and fluid forms to stage daring escapes from aquariums. They have throats that pass through their doughnut-shaped brains, three hearts pumping green blood, and arms they sometimes eat—and can regenerate.
Fascination with them has exploded over the past decade. A year after Sy Montgomery’s 2015 bestseller, The Soul of an Octopus, debuted, Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds framed encounters with octopuses as the closest humans will get “to meeting an intelligent alien.” Documentaries followed, including Netflix’s popular My Octopus Teacher in 2020. Fan clubs formed, Mark Rober’s octopus maze video racked up 100 million views on YouTube, novels featured octopus heroes, and department stores showcased octopus-themed home decor. “We are in the golden age of octopus appreciation,” Montgomery says.
The more en vogue octopuses have become, the harder it has been to defend raising them for food in tanks. Even Montgomery tells me that if Nueva Pescanova’s farm had been proposed five years sooner, there would have been less moral outrage.
Nueva Pescanova discovered this the hard way. When the company unveiled its plans in 2019 for its $75 million Canary Islands breeding facility, animal advocates and scientists opposed the project, fast and loudly. Montgomery blasted it as “extremely cruel.” Godfrey-Smith, a professor of animal philosophy, joined three others—an environmental ecologist, an animal welfare expert, and a marine biologist—to write what became opponents’ touchstone paper, “The Case Against Octopus Farming.”
They argued that octopuses would suffer stress, injury, and disease in captivity. They pointed to experiments like marine biologist Roger Hanlon’s 1977 attempt to raise Caribbean reef octopuses: He noted problems with “cannibalism, containment, dependence upon live food,” and the death of pregnant females.
The animal’s appetite also raised ecological concerns. Octopuses’ feed-conversion ratio is “at least 3:1,” the authors said, meaning that it takes at least 3 pounds of feed to produce 1 pound of octopus. In animal agriculture, this is quick math for assessing environmental efficiency: One pound of beef requires 6 to 10 pounds of feed, pork 3 to 5, and chicken closer to 2. Because octopuses are carnivores, their feed requirements would devastate wild fisheries, the authors argued.
As opposition grew, members of Greenpeace and Spain’s animal-rights political party, PACMA, gathered in Gran Canaria, the site of Nueva Pescanova’s planned facility. They painted themselves to look like octopuses and held signs reading OCTOPUS SLAVERY and STOP THE OCTOPUS PRISON. A manifesto asserting that octopuses are too intelligent for captivity was read aloud at protests in Berlin, New York, Mumbai, and Sydney.
Jane Goodall backed a petition that has collected more than 162,000 signatures. “When I learned Spanish companies plan to imprison these sensitive, fascinating creatures in ‘octopus farms,’ I was deeply distressed,” the late primatologist wrote. PETA warned of “horrific terror and pain” and predicted that the octopuses’ captivity would “almost certainly lead to unnatural aggression, cannibalism, injury, and death as they fight and struggle to escape.”
The pressure turned personal. Tur says that an activist organization spammed his work email account with thousands of messages per minute, crashing it.
Tur had visited the proposed farming site at Gran Canaria’s port of Las Palmas several times, with an eye toward implementing some of the humane aquaculture practices he’d been working on for years. A building onshore would contain nearly 1,000 tanks, to keep density low. Seawater would be pulled from the bay (and then cleaned before being returned). Plans included sand-padded “raceways” circulating water to give young octopuses—whi
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