octos at salwaterfish.com

Who knows. I wouldn't doubt they are profit taking a little under the aparent shortage.

I'm trying to be optimistic in the hope that someone starts another successful captive breeding program.
 
You would think with all the experience aquarists here someone at least might try and take on the challenge. I know I would if I had the money and the knowledge. Just think of all that potential cash...
 
Tako_Poke said:
You would think with all the experience aquarists here someone at least might try and take on the challenge. I know I would if I had the money and the knowledge. Just think of all that potential cash...

Yea, true but after having a big talk of creating a breeding/farm raising thing with octo's, it definately takes a huge lot of money which I wish someone here had because the knowledge is definately there. Most of the money would be used for the big area needed and equipment.
 
Octopets was on a lagoon, but just rented space. It looked to me like the costs of raising octos, even under the good conditions that Octopets had, is high. I ended up feeling that Octopets didn't charge enough, which is perhaps one reason it went under. After all, they had a whole "crop" of young octos escape back into the lagoon, which set things back a lot

There is at least one person trying to breed bimacs for sale right now - I'll update you when I know more.

Nancy
 
They were just babies, a couple of months old. And I don't think the owner of Octopets was much of a diver!

We all had trouble imagining hundreds of baby bimcs all trouping off into the lagoon.

Nancy
 
Tako_Poke said:
Thats terrible. I really feel bad for the guy. On the plus side, the wild population of octos probably just rocketed.

To be honest, im not sure about octo population rising. It could be declining depending on species. Lately they have been heavily fished near Europe around Spain and Japan...which are known to be one of the most highly fished octopus countries out there. Their found worldwide, but accorording to octopus fishing statistics...over 10,000 tons of octopus are caught a year. Now this number might seem small compared to "fish" caught a year, but octo's arent as populated as fish are. It's kind of worrying me because like fishermen have said...its impossible to tell if octopuses are getting endagered or not. You cant see off hand since their never seen out in the open...always hidden and camoulflaged so people cant see if a good number exists down there, yet their so easy to catch. Every year the number of octo's caught gets higher.

Whats worse is the delicacy of eating "live octopus" were people take them live whole...tear off their tentacles and wrap them around chop-sticks is getting more and more popular by word of mouth and in the media. It's originated in asia in places like Korea and Japan...and now people from America are trying it and talking about it. Video clips are even on the net and its kinda taken as a joke. Im so disgusted by it because as the years go by, more and more people dont even understand cephalopods other than being food. Everyone iv seen assumes people are using advanced graphic technology when they see an octopus camoulflage on television or change its skin texture to blend it...people are clueless and ignorant.

Right now, Dogs and Sharks have been over commercialized everywhere I go.
 
I'm sure that a proper census of cephalopods is quite difficult. I was just reading an article about the Humboldt Squid population along the Pacific Ocean in the west and they estimate huge numbers exist, even though no one ever sees them. While I doubt the same holds true for octopus, we can only hope that there are populations that remain unfound or protected.

While I really love sushi, I think the Japanese really go to extremes with the whole fresh (living) fish thing. I've heard tale of many a creature being carved up alive and in some cases, just carved on, and then thrown back into the water until the next serving! I recently watched a video on Google or a like place of some guy eating what appeared to be the freshly cut tentacles of an octopus. They were writhing around on the plate like a bunch angry worms. That made me ill.:yuck:

Let's hope that more efforts are made to educate the public about cephalopod and their unique intelligence.
 
Fini said:
I'm sure that a proper census of cephalopods is quite difficult. I was just reading an article about the Humboldt Squid population along the Pacific Ocean in the west and they estimate huge numbers exist, even though no one ever sees them. While I doubt the same holds true for octopus, we can only hope that there are populations that remain unfound or protected.

While I really love sushi, I think the Japanese really go to extremes with the whole fresh (living) fish thing. I've heard tale of many a creature being carved up alive and in some cases, just carved on, and then thrown back into the water until the next serving! I recently watched a video on Google or a like place of some guy eating what appeared to be the freshly cut tentacles of an octopus. They were writhing around on the plate like a bunch angry worms. That made me ill.:yuck:

Let's hope that more efforts are made to educate the public about cephalopod and their unique intelligence.

You've only seen 1 video? Just incase up ahead...your gonna see more. I found over 20 videos on "YouTube" which has been a super popular site now according to the news and they have various videos of octopus being eaten alive. They film it in a tank in Korea, and then cutting them up. The worst one I saw was this korean women in her house with a "skinned" octopus in her hand whole...and still alive. Skinned meaning the chromatophore layer of skin wasnt on and just the white flesh underneath was present. She took it and just left it in a garbage bag.
 
Dear god! Americans too now? Im so disgusted. Dont animal cruelty laws apply to fish to? It seems that with each passing day people become more and more inhuman and cruel. Especially those in Asia, who video tape heinous acts of violence such as a woman on high heels killing a puppy or kitten by stepping on it in high heels. Where is the justice?!?
 
animal cruelty hypocrisy

The other day, I was in a Whole Foods market, where they carry squids and several octopus salads and such. Because I was curious if the squid were locally caught (e.g. L. Opalscens) or Atlantic squids shipped frozen or something, I asked some random hippy-girl employee if she knew anything about them. She said that she didn't know, but she was sure they were "humanely caught" because they have now stopped carrying live lobsters because it's cruel (probably this is related to PETA's push for not boiling lobsters). I mentioned that I thought it was rather dubious to question boiling an animal known to have a pretty simplistic nervous system, yet chopping up an animal that's about as smart as a cat and putting it in a salad.

I'm not really all that picky about killing animals and eating them, and I'm even a bit dubious about "how much they suffer as they die" arguments, since I actually think it's worse to subject animals to long-term suffering than it is to subject them to quick-and-painful death, although I'd prefer to aim for "quick and painless."

Googling for information about lobster nervous systems, there appears to be a lot of posturing and very little actual data on the web (or maybe it's just that the "top" results are only PETA propoganda, lobster fishing industry propoganda, and very specific scientific papers that don't say much about "awareness of pain" or whatever.) I knew some people who worked on lobster stomatogastric ganglia as simple CPG (central pattern generator) models, and they seemed pretty convinced that lobsters were really, really dumb, and I don't think they had any compunctions about boiling and eating them. I know stomatopods (and maybe arguably bees) show that some arthropods have a fair bit of intelligence, but I don't see much evidence that lobsters deserve better treatment than cephs.

I'm not really intending to take a position on killing animals for food, mostly pointing out that it's a stupid argument that it somehow is less ethical to boil a lobster or crab than it is to kill fish and cephs by pulling them out of the water and asphyxiating them, and I suspect that cephs and fish, since if nothing else they've been shown to be able to learn, have an experiential rather than merely reacationary interpretation of the world.

I have some friends who think it builds character to raise their own rabbits and kill them for food, since buying a steak at the supermarket insulates people from the reality of where the food comes from. Personally, I find that I'm aware enough without that, but they make a good point... if you're going to live by eating the flesh of other animals, it's a little weird to be squeemish about it. The octopus is dead whether it was caught on a fishing boat, chopped up, and thrown into a salad, or it was impaled on a chopstick and stuffed into your mouth, right? And it's not as if cephalopods show much mercy to their lunch... Although cephalotoxin probably makes any awareness that crustaceans have go away pretty much immediately. On the other hand, a blue-ring eating a fish would probably cause paralysis without impacting awareness as in humans, since the TTX doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier into the CNS (I don't think crustaceans have a blood-brain barrier, so this wouldn't apply to them)

I guess the essential issue for me is that I think that animals that are demonstrably self-aware should not be made to suffer if it's avoidable, so I have little problem with eating live oysters or plants, which I consider to be pretty much certainly unaware, but I think cows and octopuses and chickens should be given some quality of life and quick-and-painless death. Lobsters are in a grey area, as far as I'm concerned-- I'm curious if Neogonodactylus thinks lobsters deserve the same treatment based on his stomatopod research?

In fact, I'm curious if stomatopods have a central brain, or just a bunch of distributed ganglia like a lot of inverts. I was under the impression that most arthropods have no brain per se at all, and just have a bunch of ganglia that do local computation. Whether this means they don't deserve to be considered "aware of suffering" or not is an open question, though...

I suspect that many of the people who worry about how much a lobster suffers in boiling water aren't too concerned about stepping on cockroaches, swatting flies, killing spiders, and whatnot, so a lot of this argument seems pretty questionable...
 
Wow. You sure do your research. As much as I hate peta for being lying manipulative scum sucking propoganda machines (even though I used to be a vegetarian and a member) maybe we should consider mailing them a plee for help on the whole octopus cruelty thing. After all they are pretty much the driving force in animal rights activism. If they can get people thinking about the ethics of boiling a lobster im sure they can do it for eating an octo alive.
 

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