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Are octopuses smarter than pigs? Should we eat them? Oregon bill to ban octopus farms stirs controversy

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Tuesday, February 18, 2025

Octopuses have nine brains, use tools, have the ability to recognize people and are so bright and brilliant it’d be cruel to farm them for human consumption.So said a stream of octopus enthusiasts, who extolled the many astonishing traits of the beloved, eight-legged cephalopod to a committee of the Oregon Legislature earlier this month. Nearly 70 offered spoken or written testimony in support of a bill that would forbid the farming of octopuses in the state before a single octopus production facility is even proposed.“I urge you to stand on the right side of history by voting in favor of this bill,” wrote Natalia Neal, a Damascus resident, summing up a common sentiment of the group.Many of those impassioned pleas, however, have drawn the skepticism of committee member Rep. Anna Scharf, R-Amity, who said some arguments for the bill — including that farming octopuses would put too much strain on natural resources — were “misleading” and driven by out-of-state organizations and individuals that seek to ban all large-scale farming of meat.“And then I won’t get into a debate about the intellectual ability of an octopus and some of the other things that we kill in our state that have high intellectual capability,” said Scharf, who works on a fourth-generation family farm growing wheat, hazelnuts and other crops.The bill, too, has drawn the ire of the Oregon Farm Bureau, which says it’d set “a concerning precedent” of prohibiting the farming of an entire genus of animal without “clear, science-based justification.” And so the bill has launched a wide-ranging discussion that has stirred deeper and sometimes uncomfortable questions about the intellectual abilities of the animals Oregonians eat and the industrial production of meat in a society in which many are resolving to up their daily protein intake.Is an octopus really as smart as a pig or a cow, two of the country’s most popular sources of meat, but which have the ability to play games, single out their favorite humans or understand human hand gestures?And how resource intensive is it to produce a pound of octopus versus chicken, pork, beef or fish?HB 2557 also has sparked conversations about cultural bias against the octopus as a food source, given that it’s a valued part of many world cuisines, including Asian, Mediterranean and Pacific Islander. Environmental worriesRep. Zach Hudson, D-Troutdale, said his motivations for sponsoring the bill don’t have anything to do with all of that.“This bill isn’t about whether we should eat octopus,” Hudson said. “It’s about whether they should be farmed in captivity.”Rep. Zach Hudson, D-Troutdale, said when he first heard of the idea of banning octopus farming, he thought it “sounded like a joke.” Hudson said the bill wouldn't prohibit the buying or selling of wild octopuses or keeping them as pets or for research. (File photo/January 2025) Mark Graves/The OregonianHudson said he was primarily drawn to signing on as a chief sponsor out of concern that farmed octopus isn’t a sustainable food source because of the large amount of fish and crab they eat and that they might be carriers of parasites or disease that could be spread through wastewater to the Oregon coast. But he said he also imagines that if such facilities were allowed, octopuses would be raised in small plexiglass aquariums stacked one on top of another, in conditions that are downright cruel.“A farming operation, designed to maximize profit, would presumably pack as many octopuses as possible into small barren tanks,” Hudson told the House Committee on Agriculture, Land Use, Natural Resources and Water. There are currently no food-producing octopus farms in the world, though a company in Spain has said it is close to perfecting the necessary technology. Oregon’s bill would make the state the third state in the nation, behind Washington and California, to forbid this emerging form of aquaculture.“It’s about stopping inhumane practices before they start in Oregon and sending a clear message to other regions who might be considering allowing this practice that the west coastline is unified,” said Rep. Courtney Neron, D-Wilsonville, chief co-sponsor of the bill.Rep. Courtney Neron, D-Wilsonville, is seen here in January 2025. She said during a February hearing that octopuses "are without a doubt one of my favorite animals to learn about."Mark Graves/The OregonianAnimal welfare advocates say they don’t want to argue whether long-established forms of U.S. meat production, such as farming cattle, pigs and chicken for food, may be more taxing on the environment or ethically questionable, given the intelligence of octopuses. The goal of this bill isn’t to squash already established meat production industries, but to protect the octopus, they said.“What it boils down to is it’s not really the job of legislators to put people out of business,” said Amanda Fox, executive director of Animal Rights Initiative, a national nonprofit that is a major driving force behind the bill in Oregon and bills in at least six other states.“This is a preventative issue,” Fox continued. “And most people really support not expanding farming to another type of intelligent species since we’re having trouble regulating the current types of farming.”A similar bill before the U.S. Congress fizzled last year. So did one in Hawaii, though backers this year refiled two bills, which both sailed through their first committee meetings last week. An octopus ‘moment’It’s clear octopuses are having a moment, brought on in part by “My Octopus Teacher,” which won an Oscar for best documentary in 2021, and the best-selling 2022 book “Remarkably Bright Creatures” about a giant Pacific octopus that starts a friendship with a nighttime janitor at a fictional aquarium.In 2022, the United Kingdom’s Parliament passed an act declaring octopuses sentient forms of life with feelings and individual personalities. The act also found this to be the case for a host of other living beings, including crabs, lobsters and every animal with a backbone, including chickens, pigs, cows, fish, frogs and mice.Observational reports also have documented octopuses squirting jets of water at people they didn’t like or one stealthy octopus who crept into another tank to eat live fish and covered its tracks by closing the lid when it was done. Studies have relayed multiple instances where octopuses have wielded jellyfish tentacles as a possible form of defense.But as the public’s understanding of the octopus’ cognitive ability grows, so has researchers’ caution about anthropomorphizing them and our understanding of how their brains work. According to various studies, octopuses have about 500 million neurons among their nine so-called brains, while dogs have about that many in their cerebral cortex alone. Domestic pigs have about 430 million. Humans, as a point of comparison, have 86 billion. The Octopus vulgaris has been proposed as a farmed source of food. Their life span is one to two years. (File photo)Lori M. Nichols | NJ Advance Media for NJ.comEven so, unlike other mammalian brains, a 2022 study found a significant number of the octopuses’ neuron power is decentralized in the mini-brains in each of its arms, which control their independent movement. That’s led to speculation about whether they’re capable of possessing consciousness as we know it.Much also remains unknown about how a commercial farming operation in Oregon would look, if one ever got off the ground.The world’s closest one into being is under development by the Spanish company, Nueva Pescanova, which is working to open a facility in the Canary Islands. News that broke of the planned facility in 2022 created an uproar, including over what’s seen as a slow and painful way of bringing on their deaths through submerging them in ice baths.There’s also disagreement about how much strain octopus farming would place on the environment. Animal advocates say it takes three pounds of fish or crab to produce one pound of octopus meat. Nueva Pescanova told NPR in 2024 that it planned to thoughtfully source its feed, like from discards from fishing or other sustainable sources.The Oregon Farm Bureau’s lobbyist, Ryan Krabill, said his organization objects to the movement to stop an entire food producing industry before it begins. He argues that as long as public health and safety rules are followed, the Legislature shouldn’t open “a Pandora’s box” into forbidding the farming of certain food sources because of an animal’s intellectual abilities.’Appreciate all animals’ But the bill has received a tidal wave of support. Of the more than 70 people who spoke at the early February hearing or sent written testimony, only four were opposed to the bill. That included Krabill and a woman who thinks octopus farming could be a boon to Oregon’s economy.Much more frequent were people who urged the Legislature to consider octopuses’ potential future. “These are intelligent creatures that don’t deserve this torture,” wrote Milwaukie resident Sarah Vostal.Added Brenda Hess of Forest Grove: “Stop hurting all animals. …Please love and appreciate all animals.”The Octopus vulgaris has been proposed as a farmed source of food. (File photo)Lori M. Nichols | NJ Advance MedSome of the testimony was disputed by knowledgeable sources.Fox, the executive director of Animal Rights Initiative, told the legislative committee earlier this month that “because of their exceptional cognitive abilities, octopuses are known for escaping — making them more likely than any other aquacultured species to spread disease, parasites, and genetic mutations on farms and to wild populations. For example, multiple sources report frequent escape attempts at the Seaside Aquarium, where octopuses are willing to sustain injuries in their pursuits.”When The Oregonian/OregonLive asked Fox for her source, she referenced a 2013 Trip Advisor comment in which someone who said they visited the aquarium said they saw an octopus “constantly swimming itself in to the rock wall trying to escape or trying to swim.” Fox also cited a 2015 online travel magazine article about the Seaside Aquarium that alluded to some octopuses trying “to escape their tanks more than others.” Keith Chandler, manager of the Seaside Aquarium, said on rare occasions an octopus has crawled out of its tank out of curiosity or confusion in his 44 years there.“They’re not scheming and plotting and trying to come up with ways to hotwire the car and drive back to the ocean,” Chandler said.Assistant manager Tiffany Boothe said the aquarium keeps its three octopuses well-fed, so they don’t have a reason to want to leave. “We feed them fresh razor clams and Dungeness crabs on a regular basis.” In 2016, however, “Inky” the octopus made worldwide headlines when he escaped his tank at a New Zealand aquarium, squeezed through a 50-meter drain pipe and made it to the ocean. The public debated Inky’s intentions, however — unsure whether the aging creature was curious, hungry or experiencing what experts call “senescence,” a dementia-like stage of odd behavior and confusion that octopuses go through before they die. Fox also said commercial octopus farms in Oregon could decimate the state’s crabbing industry by consuming more crab than it could produce. The Oregon Dungeness Crab Commission, however, hasn’t taken a stand on the bill. And its executive director, Crystal Adams, told The Oregonian/OregonLive that her initial impression is that commercial octopus farming is “not necessarily something that would be an endangerment so far.”Rep. Anna Scharf R-Amity. Beth NakamuraScharf’s skepticism about a need to ban octopus farming appears in the minority. No other lawmaker on the committee expressed an opinion during the bill’s hearing and its co-chairs either didn’t respond to Oregonian/OregonLive queries or said they had no comment. Scharf, however, told the news organization she’s willing to take a stand.“Those things are red flags for me,” she said. “I feel the Legislature has better things to work on than banning an industry that does not even exist in Oregon and that very little is known about.”— Aimee Green is covering the Oregon Legislature this session. Reach her at 503-294-5119, agreen@oregonian.com or @o_aimee.Our journalism needs your support. Subscribe today to OregonLive.com.

The bill has drawn enormous public support but also raised fundamental questions about the intelligence of all the animals Oregonians eat.

Octopuses have nine brains, use tools, have the ability to recognize people and are so bright and brilliant it’d be cruel to farm them for human consumption.

So said a stream of octopus enthusiasts, who extolled the many astonishing traits of the beloved, eight-legged cephalopod to a committee of the Oregon Legislature earlier this month. Nearly 70 offered spoken or written testimony in support of a bill that would forbid the farming of octopuses in the state before a single octopus production facility is even proposed.

“I urge you to stand on the right side of history by voting in favor of this bill,” wrote Natalia Neal, a Damascus resident, summing up a common sentiment of the group.

Many of those impassioned pleas, however, have drawn the skepticism of committee member Rep. Anna Scharf, R-Amity, who said some arguments for the bill — including that farming octopuses would put too much strain on natural resources — were “misleading” and driven by out-of-state organizations and individuals that seek to ban all large-scale farming of meat.

“And then I won’t get into a debate about the intellectual ability of an octopus and some of the other things that we kill in our state that have high intellectual capability,” said Scharf, who works on a fourth-generation family farm growing wheat, hazelnuts and other crops.

The bill, too, has drawn the ire of the Oregon Farm Bureau, which says it’d set “a concerning precedent” of prohibiting the farming of an entire genus of animal without “clear, science-based justification.”

And so the bill has launched a wide-ranging discussion that has stirred deeper and sometimes uncomfortable questions about the intellectual abilities of the animals Oregonians eat and the industrial production of meat in a society in which many are resolving to up their daily protein intake.

Is an octopus really as smart as a pig or a cow, two of the country’s most popular sources of meat, but which have the ability to play games, single out their favorite humans or understand human hand gestures?

And how resource intensive is it to produce a pound of octopus versus chicken, pork, beef or fish?

HB 2557 also has sparked conversations about cultural bias against the octopus as a food source, given that it’s a valued part of many world cuisines, including Asian, Mediterranean and Pacific Islander.

Environmental worries

Rep. Zach Hudson, D-Troutdale, said his motivations for sponsoring the bill don’t have anything to do with all of that.

“This bill isn’t about whether we should eat octopus,” Hudson said. “It’s about whether they should be farmed in captivity.”

Octopus bill co-sponsor — Rep. Zach Hudson, D-Troutdale, said when he first heard of the idea of banning octopus farming, he thought it “sounded like a joke.” Hudson said the bill wouldn't prohibit the buying or selling of wild octopuses or keeping them as pets or for research. (File photo/January 2025) Mark Graves/The Oregonian

Hudson said he was primarily drawn to signing on as a chief sponsor out of concern that farmed octopus isn’t a sustainable food source because of the large amount of fish and crab they eat and that they might be carriers of parasites or disease that could be spread through wastewater to the Oregon coast. But he said he also imagines that if such facilities were allowed, octopuses would be raised in small plexiglass aquariums stacked one on top of another, in conditions that are downright cruel.

“A farming operation, designed to maximize profit, would presumably pack as many octopuses as possible into small barren tanks,” Hudson told the House Committee on Agriculture, Land Use, Natural Resources and Water.

There are currently no food-producing octopus farms in the world, though a company in Spain has said it is close to perfecting the necessary technology. Oregon’s bill would make the state the third state in the nation, behind Washington and California, to forbid this emerging form of aquaculture.

“It’s about stopping inhumane practices before they start in Oregon and sending a clear message to other regions who might be considering allowing this practice that the west coastline is unified,” said Rep. Courtney Neron, D-Wilsonville, chief co-sponsor of the bill.

Animal welfare advocates say they don’t want to argue whether long-established forms of U.S. meat production, such as farming cattle, pigs and chicken for food, may be more taxing on the environment or ethically questionable, given the intelligence of octopuses. The goal of this bill isn’t to squash already established meat production industries, but to protect the octopus, they said.

“What it boils down to is it’s not really the job of legislators to put people out of business,” said Amanda Fox, executive director of Animal Rights Initiative, a national nonprofit that is a major driving force behind the bill in Oregon and bills in at least six other states.

“This is a preventative issue,” Fox continued. “And most people really support not expanding farming to another type of intelligent species since we’re having trouble regulating the current types of farming.”

A similar bill before the U.S. Congress fizzled last year. So did one in Hawaii, though backers this year refiled two bills, which both sailed through their first committee meetings last week.

An octopus ‘moment’

It’s clear octopuses are having a moment, brought on in part by “My Octopus Teacher,” which won an Oscar for best documentary in 2021, and the best-selling 2022 book “Remarkably Bright Creatures” about a giant Pacific octopus that starts a friendship with a nighttime janitor at a fictional aquarium.

In 2022, the United Kingdom’s Parliament passed an act declaring octopuses sentient forms of life with feelings and individual personalities. The act also found this to be the case for a host of other living beings, including crabs, lobsters and every animal with a backbone, including chickens, pigs, cows, fish, frogs and mice.

Observational reports also have documented octopuses squirting jets of water at people they didn’t like or one stealthy octopus who crept into another tank to eat live fish and covered its tracks by closing the lid when it was done. Studies have relayed multiple instances where octopuses have wielded jellyfish tentacles as a possible form of defense.

But as the public’s understanding of the octopus’ cognitive ability grows, so has researchers’ caution about anthropomorphizing them and our understanding of how their brains work. According to various studies, octopuses have about 500 million neurons among their nine so-called brains, while dogs have about that many in their cerebral cortex alone. Domestic pigs have about 430 million. Humans, as a point of comparison, have 86 billion.

Common Atlantic octopus — The Octopus vulgaris has been proposed as a farmed source of food. Their life span is one to two years. (File photo)Lori M. Nichols | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

Even so, unlike other mammalian brains, a 2022 study found a significant number of the octopuses’ neuron power is decentralized in the mini-brains in each of its arms, which control their independent movement. That’s led to speculation about whether they’re capable of possessing consciousness as we know it.

Much also remains unknown about how a commercial farming operation in Oregon would look, if one ever got off the ground.

The world’s closest one into being is under development by the Spanish company, Nueva Pescanova, which is working to open a facility in the Canary Islands. News that broke of the planned facility in 2022 created an uproar, including over what’s seen as a slow and painful way of bringing on their deaths through submerging them in ice baths.

There’s also disagreement about how much strain octopus farming would place on the environment. Animal advocates say it takes three pounds of fish or crab to produce one pound of octopus meat. Nueva Pescanova told NPR in 2024 that it planned to thoughtfully source its feed, like from discards from fishing or other sustainable sources.

The Oregon Farm Bureau’s lobbyist, Ryan Krabill, said his organization objects to the movement to stop an entire food producing industry before it begins. He argues that as long as public health and safety rules are followed, the Legislature shouldn’t open “a Pandora’s box” into forbidding the farming of certain food sources because of an animal’s intellectual abilities.

’Appreciate all animals’

But the bill has received a tidal wave of support. Of the more than 70 people who spoke at the early February hearing or sent written testimony, only four were opposed to the bill. That included Krabill and a woman who thinks octopus farming could be a boon to Oregon’s economy.

Much more frequent were people who urged the Legislature to consider octopuses’ potential future.

“These are intelligent creatures that don’t deserve this torture,” wrote Milwaukie resident Sarah Vostal.

Added Brenda Hess of Forest Grove: “Stop hurting all animals. …Please love and appreciate all animals.”

Some of the testimony was disputed by knowledgeable sources.

Fox, the executive director of Animal Rights Initiative, told the legislative committee earlier this month that “because of their exceptional cognitive abilities, octopuses are known for escaping — making them more likely than any other aquacultured species to spread disease, parasites, and genetic mutations on farms and to wild populations. For example, multiple sources report frequent escape attempts at the Seaside Aquarium, where octopuses are willing to sustain injuries in their pursuits.”

When The Oregonian/OregonLive asked Fox for her source, she referenced a 2013 Trip Advisor comment in which someone who said they visited the aquarium said they saw an octopus “constantly swimming itself in to the rock wall trying to escape or trying to swim.” Fox also cited a 2015 online travel magazine article about the Seaside Aquarium that alluded to some octopuses trying “to escape their tanks more than others.”

Keith Chandler, manager of the Seaside Aquarium, said on rare occasions an octopus has crawled out of its tank out of curiosity or confusion in his 44 years there.

“They’re not scheming and plotting and trying to come up with ways to hotwire the car and drive back to the ocean,” Chandler said.

Assistant manager Tiffany Boothe said the aquarium keeps its three octopuses well-fed, so they don’t have a reason to want to leave. “We feed them fresh razor clams and Dungeness crabs on a regular basis.”

In 2016, however, “Inky” the octopus made worldwide headlines when he escaped his tank at a New Zealand aquarium, squeezed through a 50-meter drain pipe and made it to the ocean. The public debated Inky’s intentions, however — unsure whether the aging creature was curious, hungry or experiencing what experts call “senescence,” a dementia-like stage of odd behavior and confusion that octopuses go through before they die.

Fox also said commercial octopus farms in Oregon could decimate the state’s crabbing industry by consuming more crab than it could produce. The Oregon Dungeness Crab Commission, however, hasn’t taken a stand on the bill. And its executive director, Crystal Adams, told The Oregonian/OregonLive that her initial impression is that commercial octopus farming is “not necessarily something that would be an endangerment so far.”

A vocal opponent — Rep. Anna Scharf R-Amity. Beth Nakamura

Scharf’s skepticism about a need to ban octopus farming appears in the minority. No other lawmaker on the committee expressed an opinion during the bill’s hearing and its co-chairs either didn’t respond to Oregonian/OregonLive queries or said they had no comment. Scharf, however, told the news organization she’s willing to take a stand.

“Those things are red flags for me,” she said. “I feel the Legislature has better things to work on than banning an industry that does not even exist in Oregon and that very little is known about.”

— Aimee Green is covering the Oregon Legislature this session. Reach her at 503-294-5119, agreen@oregonian.com or @o_aimee.

Our journalism needs your support. Subscribe today to OregonLive.com.

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Scientists pioneered a cryopreservation technique on the closely related giant pink star, raising hopes that a bank of frozen sunflower star larvae could one day be thawed in the same way and released into the wild. Along a working California harbor, where gulls wheel over weathered pilings and the old Western Flyer—the ship John Steinbeck once sailed to the Sea of Cortez—sits restored in its berth, researchers buzz about in a modest lab tucked between warehouses and boatyards. Inside, amid the hiss of pumps and the faint smell of brine from seawater tables, a scientist lifts a small vial from a plume of liquid nitrogen, its frosted casing holding the tiniest flicker of hope for a species on the brink. Each of the 18 vials contains between 500 and 700 larval giant pink sea stars. At this stage, they are tiny specks suspended in seawater, invisible to the naked eye. These particular larvae have been cryopreserved and stored at roughly minus 180 degrees Celsius since March. At the Sunflower Star Laboratory (SSL) in Moss Landing, California, scientists thawed the larval pink sea stars and coaxed them to successfully develop into juveniles this summer—a first for any sea star species. In October, the scientists thawed another batch of larvae from the same cohort to test larval growth and survival under different freezing conditions and thawing protocols. The breakthrough, however, isn’t really about the giant pink star, a species that’s common in the wild. Instead, these larvae serve as a crucial stand-in for the far more imperiled sunflower sea star (Pycnopodia helianthoides)—a vanishing species for which larvae are precious, limited and increasingly difficult to obtain. Perfecting cryopreservation methods on pink stars—ensuring they can survive freezing, resume feeding and grow into juveniles—lays the scientific groundwork for facilitating a return of Pycnopodia. The contents of a thawed vial are placed under a microscope to assess viability of the larvae. Avery Schuyler Nunn The discovery arrives at a precarious time, as sunflower stars have disappeared at a pace rarely seen in marine ecosystems. As a mysterious pathogen ravaged their population along the western shores of North America beginning in 2013, the creatures collapsed from an estimated six billion individuals to functional extinction in parts of their range—all within just a few years. Their loss left kelp forests with dramatically fewer predators, destabilizing ecosystems across the Pacific coast and allowing urchins to proliferate and graze formerly lush underwater canopies into barren rock. Now, scientists hope that “freezing” their larvae will offer a new avenue for bringing the species back. “Cryopreservation is particularly important on the population level when thinking about recovery for this endangered species, because it had major population losses,” says Marissa Baskett, an environmental scientist at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the project. The process lets scientists preserve the sea stars’ existing genetic diversity for future reintroduction to the wild, she adds. “Especially given the uncertainty about different disease outbreaks, having that stock to return to is incredibly valuable.” A mysterious and “complete collapse” Sunflower sea stars have long lived in abundance up and down the rugged Pacific coast—from Alaskan archipelagoes to Baja California. The 24-limbed echinoderms sprawled across the seafloor in shades of ochre, crimson and violet. Among the fastest-moving and largest of all sea stars—capable of stretching nearly three feet across—these radiant predators coursed through kelp forests, voraciously hunting purple sea urchins and preventing them from over-grazing on the holdfasts that root towering golden canopies of kelp. An adult sunflower sea star has 24 limbs and can be more than three feet wide. This one was photographed off Point Dume State Beach near Los Angeles. Brent Durand via Getty Images “In Northern California and Oregon, there historically would have been multiple keystone predators within the kelp forest ecosystem who are punching on purple urchins and keeping their population in check,” says Reuven Bank, board chair of SSL. “But the southern sea otter was extirpated across its historic range, so we were left with sunflower stars being the last major keystone predator of purple urchins across over 100 miles of coastline.” “And sunflower stars didn’t just eat urchins, they scared them,” Bank adds. “Urchins can smell a sunflower star approaching, and in healthy kelp forests they hide more and graze less. Even without consuming them, sunflower stars helped keep urchin behavior, and therefore kelp forests, in balance.” Then, in June 2013, tidepool monitors along Washington’s Olympic Peninsula documented an unprecedented sight. The once-sturdy sea stars had turned soft, pale and contorted, their arms curling and detaching from their bodies. By late summer, the same mysterious affliction had surfaced in British Columbia, and it began sweeping both north and south with startling speed. The emerging epidemic, which caused the invertebrates to literally disintegrate, would soon be known as sea star wasting disease. An infamous marine heatwave—nicknamed “The Blob”—had settled over the Pacific by 2014, thrusting the coast into a fever. Ocean temperatures spiked, likely speeding up the disease progression in already stressed sea stars and leading to higher mortality. In the warm, stagnant water, infected sunflower stars dissolved at an eerily rapid pace, leaving behind ghost-white films of bacterial mass where the vibrant predators had been just days before. “You’d have apparently healthy stars basically melt away into puddles of goo within 48 hours,” says Andrew Kim, lab manager at SSL. “It happened so quickly, and I don’t think folks were prepared for the ensuing ecosystem shift. You don’t often expect diseases to come through and totally reshape ecosystem dynamics within such a short period. But that’s what we saw.” Without sunflower sea stars to keep those spiny purple urchins in check, the balance began to falter, setting the stage for an unprecedented chain reaction. Urchin populations skyrocketed, grazing on kelp without limits, and once-thriving underwater forests collapsed into barren rock. A dense group of purple sea urchins, which exploded in population after the sunflower sea stars disappeared, photographed near Mendocino Headlands State Park, north of San Francisco. Brent Durand via Getty Images In California, with 99 percent loss, sunflower sea stars are now considered functionally extinct. “Even though there may be a few remnant individuals left, they can no longer fulfill their historic role in the ecosystem,” Bank says. As sunflower stars unraveled in the wild, another species—its thick-armed cousin, the giant pink star—offered an unexpected foothold for hope. The pink stars share a nearly identical geographic range and life history with sunflower stars, and crucially, their larvae can be raised in aquaria. If scientists could learn to freeze and revive the pink star in its early life stages, they wondered, could that knowledge become a lifeline for the sunflower star? That’s where the small team in Moss Landing stepped in. Freezing sea stars for the future What these scientists did was something no one had ever pulled off with a sea star. Working with giant pink stars, researchers spawned adults at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, California, fertilized their gametes to produce thousands of larvae, and shipped those microscopic bodies to the Frozen Zoo—a cryopreserved archive of creatures operated by the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. There, reproductive scientists plunged the larvae into liquid nitrogen, cooling them to extremely low temperatures and pausing their cells’ biological activity. The larvae, essentially frozen in time, were shielded from ice crystal damage with special cryoprotectant mixtures. Sunflower Star Laboratory researchers remove a vial of pink star larvae from an insulated cooler at around minus 180 degrees Celsius in preparation for thawing. Avery Schuyler Nunn After months in this suspended state, the larvae were sent to the Sunflower Star Laboratory where Carly Young, a San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance scientist who advances cryopreservation and reproductive-rescue tools, led the team in thawing the vials. She had fine-tuned the ideal way to keep the larvae alive as they returned to real-world temperatures, carefully testing more than 100 “recipes” with various warming rates, cryoprotectant dilutions and rehydration steps. The pink star larvae not only survived thawing, but have thus far lived all the way through metamorphosis into juveniles. Scientists watched the little stars settle spontaneously along the bottom of their beakers just 19 days after revival. The success prompted the team to apply the same cryopreservation protocols to sunflower star larvae from the Alaska SeaLife Center. The larvae will be frozen in perpetuity, creating the first-ever cryopreserved archive of the species—like a seed bank, but for the baby sea stars. “A famous quote from the ’70s, when the Frozen Zoo in San Diego was established, was, ‘You must collect things for reasons you don’t yet understand,’” says Ashley Kidd, conservation project manager at SSL. “We don’t know when the other shoe is going to drop and what populations are going to look like as the planet changes. So, rather than chasing ghosts around the ocean floor, we really focused on what we can do with animals that are currently under human care somewhere.” While cryopreservation itself isn’t a ready-made restoration tool, it opens the door to conserving genetic diversity of a species and banking rare lineages for potential reintroduction to the wild. In the 1970s and 1990s, researchers began testing cryopreservation of marine invertebrates with sperm and larvae, establishing the basic protocols that this team could apply to sea stars. The breakthrough doesn’t restore kelp forests by itself, but the SSL scientists note that cryopreservation creates something the conservation community has desperately needed: time. Time to hold onto genetic diversity, time to refine captive rearing and time to prepare for future reintroduction at scales big enough to matter. The ultimate test, the researchers say, will be translating the thawing process to sunflower sea stars. Carly Young, at the Sunflower Star Laboratory, looks for movement in the young sea stars. Avery Schuyler Nunn Just this summer, scientists uncovered a piece of the puzzle that had eluded them for more than a decade: the pathogen behind sea star wasting disease. In a four-year international effort, researchers traced the outbreak to a strain of the marine bacterium Vibrio pectenicida. When cultured and injected into healthy sea stars, it reproduced the telltale symptoms—softening arms, rapid disintegration and death within days. The finding, published in Nature Ecology and Evolution in August, gives recovery teams a way to test for the pathogen in labs and hatcheries, tighten quarantine measures and understand disease risks before returning captive-bred sea stars to the Pacific. “It’s massively important to know what to look for, and the fact that we are now able to test for this disease is going to be critical in advancing our ability to move forward with reintroductions and continuing the research,” notes Kim. “We’ve already been able to take fluid samples from all of our stars and get them analyzed for the presence of Vibrio pectenicida, so we’ve mobilized very quickly on the heels of development.” Paired with this new diagnostic clarity, advances in cryopreservation offer a second front in the effort to save the species. Frozen larvae can be stored for decades and offer flexibility for selective breeding of disease-tolerant traits, notes the team. Cryopreservation adds another tool to the scientists’ toolbox as they fight to prevent the species—and, in turn, its ecosystem—from wasting away. “Bringing back sunflower stars,” Bank says, “is the single-most important step we can take toward restoring kelp forest balance.” Get the latest Science stories in your inbox.

Animals

Conservation

Culture

Archaeologists Are Unraveling the Mysteries Behind Deep Pits Found Near Stonehenge

Based on a comprehensive study, researchers are now convinced the shafts were human-made, likely dug during the Late Neolithic period roughly 4,000 years ago

Archaeologists Are Unraveling the Mysteries Behind Deep Pits Found Near Stonehenge Based on a comprehensive study, researchers are now convinced the shafts were human-made, likely dug during the Late Neolithic period roughly 4,000 years ago Sarah Kuta - Daily Correspondent December 10, 2025 9:59 a.m. The pits are evenly spaced around a large circle. University of Bradford In 2020, archaeologists in the United Kingdom made a surprising discovery. At Durrington Walls, a large Neolithic henge not far from Stonehenge, they found more than a dozen large, deep pits buried under layers of loose clay. The pits are mysterious. Each one measures roughly 30 feet wide by 15 feet deep, and together they form a mile-wide circle around Durrington Walls and neighboring Woodhenge. They also appear to be linked with the much older Larkhill causewayed enclosure, built more than 1,000 years before Durrington Walls. For the last few years, archaeologists have been puzzling over their origins: Were they dug intentionally by human hands? Were they naturally occurring structures, like sinkholes? Or is there some other possible explanation for the existence of these colossal shafts? Quick fact: The purpose of Durrington Walls While Stonehenge is thought to have been a sacred place for ceremonies, Durrington Walls was a place where people actually lived. In a new paper published in the journal Internet Archaeology, archaeologists report that they have a much better understanding of the pits’ purpose, chronology and environmental setting. And, now, they are confident the shafts were made by humans. “They can’t be occurring naturally,” says lead author Vincent Gaffney, an archaeologist at the University of Bradford, to the Guardian’s Steven Morris. “It just can’t happen. We think we’ve nailed it.” Chris Gaffney, an archaeologist at the at the University of Bradford, surveys the ground near Durrington Walls. University of Bradford For the study, researchers returned to the site in southern England and used several different methods to further analyze the unusual structures. They used a technique known as electrical resistance tomography to calculate the pits’ depths, and radar and magnetometry to suss out their shapes. They also took core samples of the sediment, then ran the soil through a variety of tests. For instance, they used optically stimulated luminescence to determine the last time each layer of soil had been exposed to the sun. They also looked for traces of animal or plant DNA. Astonishing' Stonehenge discovery offers new insights into Neolithic ancestors. Together, the results of these analyses indicate humans must have been involved, which suggests the pits could be “one of the largest prehistoric structures in Britain, if not the largest,” Gaffney tells the BBC’s Sophie Parker. Researchers suspect the circle pits were created by people living at the site over a short period of time during the Late Neolithic period roughly 4,000 years ago. They were not “simply dug and abandoned” but, rather, appear to have been part of a “structured, monumental landscape that speaks to the complexity and sophistication of Neolithic society,” Gaffney says in a statement. For example, the pits are fairly evenly spaced around the circle, which suggests their Neolithic creators were measuring the distances between them somehow. “The skill and effort that must have been required to not only dig the pits, but also to place them so precisely within the landscape is a marvel,” says study co-author Richard Bates, a geophysicist at the University of St Andrews, in a statement. “When you consider that the pits are spread over such a large distance, the fact they are located in a near perfect circular pattern is quite remarkable.” Researchers used multiple methods to investigate the pits at Durrington Walls. University of Bradford But who dug the pits? And, perhaps more importantly, why? Archaeologists are still trying to definitively answer those questions, but they suspect the shafts were created to serve as some sort of sacred boundary around Durrington Walls. Their creators may also have been trying to connect with the underworld, per the Guardian. “They’re inscribing something about their cosmology, their belief systems, into the earth itself in a very dramatic way,” Gaddney tells the BBC. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

Animals

Science

Is red meat bad for you? Limited research robs us of a clear answer.

We’d all appreciate more definitive guidance. Eating a varied diet is a wise move while we wait.

Over and over, we ask the question: Is Food X good or bad for you? And, over and over, belief in the answer — whether it’s yes or no — is held with conviction totally out of proportion with the strength of the evidence.Today’s illustration: red meat. It has become one of the most-disputed issues in food. It’s so polarizing that some people decide to eat no meat at all, while others decide to eat only meat. It’s poison, or it’s the only true fuel.The latest salvo in the Meat Wars was kicked off by a new report that outlines the optimal diet for both people and planet. The EAT-Lancet Report comes down hard on red meat; its recommended daily intake is a mere 14 grams — that’s half an ounce.Read on, and the news gets worse: “Because intake of red meat is not essential and appears to be linearly related to higher total mortality and risks of other health outcomes in populations that have consumed it for many years, the optimal intake may be zero.”Note that word: “related.” It’s the source of the problem with the report and its recommendation.The EAT-Lancet report, by researchers from 17 countries, bases its recommendation solely on observational data. When you do that, meat comes out looking pretty bad. In study after study, people who report eating a lot of meat have worse health outcomes than people who eat little. Meat-eating correlates with increased risk of heart disease, some cancers and all-cause mortality.But, as always with observational research that attempts to connect the dots between diet and health, the key question is whether the meat itself, or something else associated with a meat-heavy lifestyle, is actually causing the bad outcomes.That’s a hard question to answer, but there are clues that people who eat a lot of meat are very different from people who eat a little.Let’s look at a study, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, cited by the EAT-Lancet report; it has a convenient demographic summary. According to it, people in the top one-fifth of meat eaters are different from people in the bottom fifth in a lot of important ways: They weigh more, they’re more likely to smoke, they’re not as well-educated, they get less exercise, and they report lower intakes of fruit, vegetables and fiber. On the plus side, they report drinking less alcohol. But other than that, we’re looking at a litany of markers for a lifestyle that’s not particularly health-conscious.So, to suss out whether it’s the meat that’s raising disease risk, you have to somehow correct for any of the differences on that list — and most of that information also comes from observational research, so even the confounders are confounded.Then there are the things you can’t correct for. Sleep quality, depression and screen time, for example, all correlate with some of the same diseases meat correlates with, but most studies have no information on those.All this confounding explains one of my all-time favorite findings from observational research. It comes from the same study the demographics came from (analyzed in a 2015 paper). Sure enough, the people who ate the most meat were more likely to die of cancer and heart disease, but they were also more likely to die in accidents. And the biggest difference came from the catchall category “all others,” which invariably includes causes of death that have nothing to do with meat.Basically, there’s a very simple problem with relying on observational research: People who eat a lot of meat are very different from people who eat less of it. The meat definitely isn’t causing the accidental deaths (unless, perhaps, they’re tragic backyard grill mishaps), and it isn’t causing at least some of the “all others” deaths, so we know that heavy and light meat-eaters are different in all kinds of ways.That’s where controlled trials come in.In a perfect world, we could figure this out by keeping a large group of people captive for a lifetime, feeding half of them meat, and seeing what happens. Okay, maybe that’s not a perfect world, but it would be the best solution to this particular problem.Instead, we have trials that are short-term (because of logistics and cost), and necessarily rely on markers for disease, rather than the disease itself. For that to be useful, you need a marker that’s a reliable indicator. For a lot of diseases — including cancer — those are hard to come by. For heart disease, we have a good one: low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol. So, most of the controlled trials of meat-eating focus on heart disease.If you spend some time reading those trials (and I did, so you don’t have to), you find that most of them show some increase in LDL cholesterol, although it’s generally small.A 2025 analysis of 44 controlled trials on meat found that the only ones showing positive cardiovascular outcomes had links to the meat industry, and even then, only about one in five came out positive. Of the independent studies, about three-quarters showed negative outcomes, and the remaining one-quarter was neutral.This isn’t surprising. Red meat contains saturated fat, and we have countless trials that demonstrate sat fat’s ability to raise LDL. But if the meat you eat is relatively lean, that effect is going to be small.The lesson here is that we don’t have a lot of good evidence on meat and health. The observational evidence is hopelessly confounded, and the evidence from clinical trials is woefully limited. There’s so much we simply don’t know. There may be other ways meat raises risk (leading to over-absorption of heme iron and stimulating the production of TMAO, or trimethylamine N-oxide), but there’s little definitive evidence for them. And, of course, there’s the question of what you eat instead. If you’re eating red meat instead of, say, instant ramen, that may be an improvement. If, instead, you’re cutting back on your lentils, not so much.As always, the single-most important thing to remember about nutrition is that what we know is absolutely dwarfed by what we don’t know. Which means that, if you’re making decisions based on what we do know, you could very well be wrong.So what’s an eater to do? Meat is a nutritious food. In fact, animal foods are the only natural sources of a vitamin we need — B12 — which is an indication that we evolved with meat and dairy as part of our diet. It’s very hard to know whether eating some lean meat leads to better outcomes than eating no meat, but I think some meat is a good hedge against all that uncertainty. (The ethical and environmental concerns are also important, but for today let’s focus on health.)But plant foods are also nutritious. And eating a wide variety of them is also a good hedge against uncertainty. Which means the carnivore diet — all meat, all the time! — is a pretty bad bet.Unfortunately, “uncertainty” is not a word that features prominently in the Meat Wars. Instead, we have an unappetizing combination of nastiness and sanctimony, with each camp convinced that the truth and the light are on their side.Not that this is a metaphor for our times or anything.

Animals

Food

Health

Suggested Viewing

HOME

If you visit Hawaii for the first time, you might be shocked about the wild chickens everywhere around the island. HOME explores the variety of relationship between people and wild chicken in Hawaii. People are trying to protect their community, but wild chickens become a huge part of it. Now we need to find a home for wild chickens, if it’s not already taken over by humans.

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A Year With Northern Owls

We follow five North American owls in different seasons; from summer heat to spring rejuvenation.

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Total Disaster

Armed with realistic bird puppets, trickster environmental activists pretend to be oil company Total—staging a satirical press conference to introduce "RéHabitat," a program to rescue animals from the East African Oil Pipeline by relocating them to “more sustainable” habitats. Using humor and mischief, they expose a deadly ecological disaster in a zany effort to help #StopEACOP.

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Reboot

Humans have exploited Earth to the point where it is no longer possible to live on it. Their only option is to relocate to Mars. When the last group of people has boarded the spaceship for the red planet, the Earth can finally breathe easy. Like an expressionist painting, Reboot depicts a world in which the absence of our species is the only chance nature has to recover its lushness and flourish once more.

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TO SEE THE SNOW LEOPARD

“To see a snow leopard is to see God.” It’s a film about the search of the snow leopard - a beautiful and rare animal. There are only a few thousand of them left on the planet. Most of the animals have been given names but almost no one has seen them. This is a story about the mystery of human’s contact with another life, with wild nature, and the search for the lost source of inner strength. Scientists, hunters, shamans, tourists - the leopard sees them, but they do not see him.

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