Plans to build the world’s first commercial octopus farm are dead. On July 22, the Port Authority of Las Palmas announced that Nueva Pescanova, the Spanish seafood giant behind the proposal, had withdrawn its application to build the octopus farm in the Canary Islands.
How did this happen? It followed a coordinated effort by more than a hundred scientists, dozens of conservation and animal advocacy groups and tens of thousands of ordinary citizens, including a 9-year-old girl in Portugal.
The campaign benefited from a fortuitous convergence of circumstances: Elena Lara of Compassion in World Farming dug into why octopuses — wild animals now widely recognized as intelligent and sentient — should not be confined in tanks or cages. In 2024, more than 100 scientists wrote a letter to the journal Science detailing the remarkable intelligence of octopuses and the ecological foolishness of farming a carnivorous species. And the 2020 documentary My Octopus Teacher captured the imaginations of millions of ordinary people.
