Too smart to eat? Why octopus farms are such a slippery problem

Published 13 August 2026 · science

In 2022 Nueva Pescanova, Spain’s largest fisheries business, announced it was investing €65m (£56m) in the world’s first industrial octopus farm and processing plant near

In 2022 Nueva Pescanova, Spain’s largest fisheries business, announced it was investing €65m (£56m) in the world’s first industrial octopus farm and processing plant near the Canary Islands’ port of Las Palmas. Despite the creatures being notoriously difficult to farm, the company predicted that by 2025 it would be producing 3,000 tonnes of octopus a year on Gran Canaria. There followed years of controversy, with activists and scientists condemning the plans to farm an animal lauded for its apparent “intelligence”, which reached near-celebrity status five years ago thanks to the Oscar-winning documentary My Octopus Teacher. Then, at the end of July 2026, Nueva Pescanova shelved plans for the farm. But why – and with what implications for the future of octopus farming? A Guardian request for comment from Nueva Pescanova was met with silence but it told the Canary Islands’ port authority in a letter that it was pulling out for “business and regulatory” reasons. View image in fullscreen An octopus paralarva at 55 days – when young cephalopods move about with the water current. Photograph: Nueva Pescanova Activists who have long opposed the farm were quick to claim a victory. “Social, scientific and political pressure has borne fruit, faced with this ethical and environmental atrocity,” Spain’s animal rights party, Pacma, said in a statement. When the Guardian visited the company’s research centre in 2023, Roberto Romero Pérez, the marine biologist overseeing aquaculture at Nueva Pescanova, had said: “The truth is that we’re finding the mood to be a bit more hostile than expected.” However, Silvia Fernández Díaz, a journalist at Canarias7 who has covered the story from the start, says that far from being a mass movement, demonstrations on the island against the project rarely attracted more than a few dozen protesters.

“I believe the reality is that the farm didn’t go ahead because it wasn’t viable, not because of popular protest,” she says. Sources at Las Palmas port authority confirmed that they had not been approached by anyone from Nueva Pescanova and no work had been done on building the farm. Ian Gleadall, a marine biologist at Tohoku University in Japan who has spent 50 years researching octopuses, says he has been trying for two years to get a response from Nueva Pescanova about the Canary Islands project without success. “The same thing happened here in Japan with the fisheries company Nissui,” he says. “The company said they’d cracked it and were going to be producing massive amounts of octopus but it never happened.” Gleadall says octopuses have so far been virtually impossible to farm because the larvae of the common octopus spend at least 20 days floating in the water before they settle on the sea bed, making it difficult to move on to the next phase. Even then, he says, the hatchlings are so delicate that if anything goes wrong they die. He adds that another significant problem is what to feed the octopus: “One feed is a form of fish paste. But even if they eat it, they won’t go on eating it because octopus are very finicky – they don’t like to eat the same thing day in, day out. “Even if you could solve the feed problem,” he says, “you’d probably spend more on feed than the octopus was worth on the market.” The ethical objections to octopus farming are that the creatures are solitary and antisocial, as well as the studies showing “compelling evidence” of sentience.