Farming Octopus

FarmerDen

Hatchling
Registered
Joined
Jun 9, 2018
Messages
6
Location
Perth, Australia
I am about to start a small scale trial with the aim to farm octopus. I have extensive experience in aquaculture and I think this can be done. We will start with 2 above ground swimming pools and put wild caught baby octopus in separate contains and feed the crabs and trash fish. If the trail work we intend to scale up.
 
What species are you hoping to farm? If I remember correctly, your common octopus, Octopus tetricus (gloomy) is a small egg species for which we (individuals as well as public aquariums and labs) have had no success.

Here is a link to a bit of discussion and several articles about various on going attempts at farming. You may wish to add to that discussion as well as starting a journal type post in Tank Talk as @tonmo suggests.
 
I will be trying to farm octopus Vulgaris. My home state fishery have spent $660,000 on a study but trying to breed and grow them. The problem is making the fertilised eggs viable! Most die within days due to requirement for special feed. I intend to obtain baby octopus caught by local fishermen and grow them in individual boxes.Feeding will be trash fish and small crabs.
I don't think anyone in the world has tried this? My experience in aquaculture leads me to think observation is the key to success and the right food.
 
Sorry, how do I get the link to other articles??
Use the initial link in post 3 to go to the discussion thread. All links that were available show up there as a slightly different color (a dark blue where the text is black). If you hover your cursor over the link text, it will display as orange. Often we only have links to the abstracts and you will need to pay for the article if you are not subscribed to the journal. Be sure to scroll through the whole thread to find all the references.

Others have been able to raise small egg species (including vulgaris) once they have reached the settlement stage. The mortality is still high but at least there is some success where new hatchling success is sadly abysmal.
 
Thanks for that info! The baby octopus business is very large so that is my focus for stock. The real trick will be to get them live and grow them from 50 grams to 1000 grams in a short time? Do you have an octopus "expert" available?
 
Our hobby focus is on individual animal care and not mass production/reproduction. The majority of our experts are scientists studying cephalopod welfare, conservation, neurology or aquarium overall success so reproduction for consumption is only followed for it successes in longevity, settlement and reducing the stressors on animals in the wild.
 
I don't know of anyone that ships them in volume except for the Asian markets where the loss is higher than the sales. For the hobbyist, successful shipping requires large volumes of water and Oxygen (not just air), overnight shipping and often some form of temperature control (either time of year or heat/cold packs). Often the cost of shipping is greater than the cost of the animal.
 

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