GPO: Tank size.

[skywindsurfer]

Entire life expectancy from when its delivered to us, generally about three feet from to tip of the mantel to arm tip. The tank is roughly 4 tall, 6 long, and 3-4 wide. I'm just guessing from experience inside them. Of course you need to take off about 6 inches on the right, left, and back for the fake rock wall. I'll post a picture later of its current exhibit and the exhibit I'd like to see it in.

 

[neurobadger]

I'm surprised to see this thread is still up.

Thales, is there any sort of talk in the professional aquarist realm about writing a cephalopod care manual? I know ceph's called for standards.

There needs to be some serious advocacy for cephalopods in aquaria.

 

[Thales]

I'm surprised to see this thread is still up.

Thales, is there any sort of talk in the professional aquarist realm about writing a cephalopod care manual? I know ceph's called for standards.

There needs to be some serious advocacy for cephalopods in aquaria.

Yes there is talk. I have been asked several times to help, and said 'let me know what I can do' and have heard nothing back. My assumption is that everyone is buried under work so this kind of thing gets puts on everyones back burner. Hopefully in June I will have some time (really, I am totally swamped until then, and I am sure something else will come up!) to push for more of this kind of thing. I actually think there is a manual or a 1/2 done one, but it needs work.

This is only for AZA - there are plenty of public aquariums that are not AZA.

 

[neurobadger]

Where's the manual?

 

[perke]

Thales, I'd like to help with your manual if possible or at least get a copy when your finished as my aquarium isn't in the states( so not affiliated with AZA) but we do have some there and the company I work for has 30 odd aquariums around the world now and counting. I'm currently advising on tank sizes, mortality reduction etc as part of my phd and would like to have things like your manual to back me up a bit along with my own research when advising to the big wigs.

 

[Thales]

Dunno where the manual is or if it actually exists in any form. June!

 

[neurobadger]

I'm not aware if the US has regulations similar to those of the EU concerning cephalopods as protected research subjects.

 

[neurobadger]

What does the cephalopod research community and aquarist community need to get the ball rolling on an effort to introduce a manual? Would it be worth the effort to try to develop an amendment to animal welfare law that includes cephalopods?

 

[Thales]

What does the cephalopod research community and aquarist community need to get the ball rolling on an effort to introduce a manual?

I can only speak for my small portion of the aquarist community, but time.
Of course, a manual is also going to be fraught with stuff that some think is unacceptable. We see it here on TONMO already. I think there should be guidelines, not rules, and deciding on which rules or guidelines are to be used is a bit monumental.

Would it be worth the effort to try to develop an amendment to animal welfare law that includes cephalopods?

I would say that would be more likely to generate really more unhelpful legislation than useful legislation. At least in the US, things seem so legislatively charged right now, that any law based push is likely to backfire.

 

[neurobadger]

I can only speak for my small portion of the aquarist community, but time.
Of course, a manual is also going to be fraught with stuff that some think is unacceptable. We see it here on TONMO already. I think there should be guidelines, not rules, and deciding on which rules or guidelines are to be used is a bit monumental.



I would say that would be more likely to generate really more unhelpful legislation than useful legislation. At least in the US, things seem so legislatively charged right now, that any law based push is likely to backfire.

The problem with guidelines, at least from what I've read of animal welfare law (as a wee undergrad researcher-in-training who needs to know what law governs her experimental critters), is that they are precisely that, and thus not enforceable!

(Of course, I'm an undergrad, so take that with a grain of salt!)

Euroceph 2011, from its website, was convened in response to an EU directive on cephalopod protections; why isn't there as robust a protection here?

 

[DWhatley]

You will also hear suggestions of frustration from scientists in those countries with strict university adherence. Pounds of paperwork for even simple project and advance permissions the makes it impractical to take advantage of an unusual find or something as simple as raising squid eggs. It seems to me the current way of directives stymie science that is trying to understand and protect and ignores placing bans on far more impactive (and cruel) practices seafloor disruption and trawl fishing. I often wonder if good guidelines are not published for fear they would become law.

 

[neurobadger]

You will also hear suggestions of frustration from scientists in those countries with strict university adherence. Pounds of paperwork for even simple project and advance permissions the makes it impractical to take advantage of an unusual find or something as simple as raising squid eggs. It seems to me the current way of directives stymie science that is trying to understand and protect and ignores placing bans on far more impactive (and cruel) practices seafloor disruption and trawl fishing. I often wonder if good guidelines are not published for fear they would become law.

Good guidance and forethought might factor into taking advantage of finds and eggs; provisions need to be made for these kinds of situations and even animal welfare laws written years ago are still changing. I'm not familiar with the particulars of any directives governing sea life or whatever directives the NSF has. However, I have a connection at one of NIH's agencies (and depending on the research, it may or may not use NIH funds), and she told me a little bit more than I already knew about how animal welfare governance works there. This only applies to research animals, not aquarium animals, and I know UFAW already has a publication on the care of cephalopods in the laboratory, but there is the same concern for the animal's welfare; aquarium cephalopod welfare would, I suspect, build upon research cephalopod welfare, due to the long-term use of the aquarium's animal as opposed to more short-term use of the research animal. I can't speak from the zoo/aquarium end of this, of course, but surely there are some commonalities.

http://grants.nih.gov/grants/olaw/olaw.htm
http://grants.nih.gov/grants/olaw/references/phspol.htm

Pay special attention to the Health and Research Extension Act of 1985 and the U.S. Government Principles for the Utilization and Care of Vertebrate Animals Used in Testing, Research, and Training.

Bans on seafloor disruption and trawl fishing are presumably not governed by the same folks who control welfare. I'm guessing NOAA and USDA have heavy hands in this.

Dwhatley, I'm not sure about whether you're talking about cephalopod welfare in the context of fishing and collection or in the lab and aquarium; I'm referring specifically to cephalopods in captivity; are you talking about issues of collecting the animal?

It seems to me that approaching this issue regarding cephalopod protection in both the research and aquarium realms should be approached in the same way vertebrate welfare has been; there are the same issues with animal collection and new finds in many vertebrate species, and yet vertebrates have protection. I have to wonder what kind of uproar there would be if someone complained about animal welfare guidelines in a vertebrate species because they were supposedly trying to stymie science; all these regulations are made specifically with the animal's welfare in mind, and any project that's put on the desk of a scientific review officer or an IACUC that has inadequate provisions for the welfare of animal subjects of any sort deservedly is trashed. There needs to be a definition of what is 'adequate' and it needs to be enforced the way vertebrate animal welfare is enforced.

 

[Thales]

Words like 'enforced' scare me. I am uninterested in anything that needs to be enforced because I have seen it backfire too many times. A guide or manual, sure - anything else, scary. Unless of course, you can show that there is a systemic problem, but I don't think there is.

Check the AZA site and see if something like what you are looking for already exists. I bet in general, it does.

 

[neurobadger]

Here is a link to the European Commission for the Environment's website for the revision of the directive:

Animals in science

I now there isn't a systemic problem, Thales, and I strongly doubt there are any cases of ceph abuse in research labs and aquaria (other than possibly the one that started this thread, which is in, in fact, an AZA member aquarium), but consider the impact of welfare laws for vertebrates; for example, the requirement to establish humane endpoints results in considerable reduction of suffering because it establishes points at which an animal must be removed from an experiment, either because the experiment has ended or because the animal is sick or hurt. There is no such requirement for invertebrates (although I know of at least one case in the context of pain research, on tonmo user robyn's blog - http://www.tonmo.com/blog/entry.php?66-Getting-published.... - , where research has not been allowed to go forward because of animal welfare concerns about invertebrates. I suppose institutional review boards may cover some of this in the research setting).

The AZA site doesn't have much for nonmembers other than a section on conservation initiatives (e.g. the white-spotted octopus). I'd guess you have an account that you can use to access information for members, and if you can find any, please share it with us if possible.

I guess I'm approaching this from this viewpoint: the common octopus, at least (best-studied among the cephalopods), is rightly considered an honorary vertebrate in the EU for good reasons.

First, it has a brain-to-body mass comparable to many birds and mammals.

(I was actually present, in fact, for an informal brain-to-body-mass determination of a Humboldt squid in October at the National Science and Engineering Festival; I was working with Dr. William Gilly and he was doing some stuff for a kid whose birthday it was that day. Using a small luggage scale, we determined that it had a brain-to-body-mass ratio somewhere between "a frog and a dog". This is a Humboldt squid, not a common octopus; the Humboldt squid is considerably less behaviorally complex, as far as I'm aware, than a common octopus!)

The brain-to-body-mass ratio (or encephalization quotient) and other measures such as the surface area to volume ratio of the brain are good rough estimates (not perfect) of the complexity of an animal's cognition.

Here is a list of relevant publications: Google Scholar

I shouldn't have to go far into behavioral complexity to explain why this probably would justify some sort of legally-codified protection of cephalopods, because I'm assuming most people on this forum know about it.

In addition, again referencing Robyn's blog post, there is some evidence that the peripheral nervous system of octopuses may take care of at least some amount of sensory and motor processing, but nobody seems to know how much and whether the CNS is involved in processing pain.



In general, at least for me (and I'm going to carry out research on cephalopods for a living, so I know I'll be dealing with this, too), it seems kind of selfish to give a higher priority to bureaucratic concerns such as mountains of paperwork, rules that might 'backfire' (can you provide instances of when these sorts of things backfired?), advance permissions, or some claim that these directives get in the way of doing science than to the well-being of our captive cephalopods. These sort of claims - and I sincerely don't wish to offend, but this is quite true - are old hat when it comes to vertebrate welfare.

You may not abuse the cephalopods in your care, even unintentionally, but perhaps somewhere along the line there may be some idiot who does.

 

[neurobadger]

Jennifer Mather's paper on invertebrate pain, for reference: http://www.rw.ttu.edu/ethics/pdf's/A6 .pdf