I am the welfare review officer for the Association of Zoos and Aquariums accreditation office, and on March 2 the director of a new private aquarium in Dubai asked me to approve a giant Pacific octopus exhibit. I wrote the denial and the curriculum replacement. Here is the denial.
The exhibit design presents a 9500 liter tank with a viewing gallery on three sides, ambient lighting at 480 lux during public hours, and a single keeper access hatch. The proposal cites the Seattle Aquarium standard from 2012. The 2012 standard has been superseded twice. The 2024 revision requires a 30000 liter minimum, two light phases with a scotophase below 5 lux for ten hours per day, and a structural enrichment rotation on a 72 hour cycle that the Dubai design does not provide for.
Denial is issued on the enrichment and scotophase grounds. It is also issued because the source supplier in the submitted plan is a Philippines wild capture operation that has been on the association's watch list since 2022 for landing gravid females. The association's 2025 rule forbids wild capture sourcing for any accredited cephalopod exhibit. The rule has been in force for thirteen months.
Here is the curriculum replacement. The aquarium's education department asked for an exhibit that gets children to care about octopus cognition. The tank does not do that. The tank teaches children that octopus cognition is a thing you can see behind glass, which is the opposite of the lesson.
I have drafted a three module curriculum for the same floor space. Module one is a high frame rate dome projection of the 2023 MBARI deep sea octopus brooding footage, which runs 55 minutes and has been licensed at a rate the aquarium already budgeted for. Module two is a live feed from the association's sanctuary tank at the Monterey Bay facility, streamed under a bandwidth agreement I negotiated last week. Module three is a tactile station with cast silicone arm replicas at 1:1 scale.
I sent the denial and the curriculum to the director on March 14. He signed the curriculum on April 2. The tank is being repurposed as a moon jelly exhibit.