Lots of us have seen the excellent Netflix film, ‘My Octopus Teacher’.
Some of us have read ‘Other Minds’ by Peter Godfrey Smith.
That octopuses are very smart seems undeniable. As a result, we’ve never listed them on our market*.
But I’ve been giving this issue a lot more thought recently, and I’d like your thinking on it too please.
Because the truth is that British waters are now in danger of being overrun by octopuses.
We are experiencing what is termed an octopus ‘bloom’, the largest in at least 75 years.
And, importantly, this bloom is not of our native curled or horned species but instead the warm-water common octopus - until recently much more likely to have been found in the Med and the Atlantic coast of the Iberian peninsula.
The data is clear - as water temperatures around our coasts have risen, so have octopus numbers.
Over 400,000 tonnes of ‘em were landed in a single month last year – five times usual levels. At the same time, catches of crab, lobster and scallop have fallen by between 30% - 50%.
That, in the end, is the problem. The octopuses, as this New York Times piece makes clear, are ‘eating anything in their path’.
This is borne out by what we’ve heard anecdotally from the fishermen we work with – especially those who have historically potted crabs.
Because in the last little while what they have found, as they pull up pot after pot, is not the crab that they wanted but instead the octopuses that had eaten them. It’s why we’ve had so little crab on the market in the last year or so.
All of which makes me wonder whether what we’re dealing here is, to coin a phrase, ‘the venison of the sea’: a creature whose unchecked numbers pose such a real and present danger to other wildlife that we almost have a duty to eat it.
What do you think? Please let me have your views.
Nick
* Yes, pigs are also very smart. And many other animals that we eat too. There can be no doubt that they are all sentient. So admittedly perhaps this position never really made much sense….
