The world’s first indoor octopus farm in Gran Canaria could produce 3,000 tonnes of meat a year from a thousand tanks according to the Spanish company behind the proposals. But satisfying a growing global appetite for the mollusc by farming it isn’t as simple as it sounds.

Octopuses are playful, astute and prolific tool users which have so far eluded efforts to breed them in captivity. These qualities should disqualify them from mass production, says Lindsay Hamilton, a professor of animal organisation studies at the University of York.

Octopuses are solitary by nature and would likely find captivity distressing, while research shows that routine slaughter by immersion in ice slurry is inhumane. Hamilton argues that arbitrary decisions over which species are worthy companions and which are “food-in-waiting” continue to produce unethical systems of food production.

Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum turns 50 this year and, to celebrate, The Conversation has published a series of articles that offer a fresh look at the post-impressionist painter, starting with a re-examination of the ‘tortured genius’ narrative. And to accompany a new instalment of our Great Mysteries of Physics podcast, a theoretical physicist looks at the problems the idea of a multiverse creates for science.

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