Day 1828: An octopus farm!

We started out today with a visit to an octopus farm.  It was located very close to the seahorse farm, and in fact the guy who runs it used to work at Ocean Rider.  Then, one day, inspired by the success of the seahorse farm, he was inspired to work on the same vision, but with octopuses.  The Kona Octopus Farm is definitely a lower-rent operation — 400 square feet leased, according to Jake, the founder and maybe-it-was-kinda-unclear only employee of the farm, at $1/square foot. 

The Kona Octopus Farm -- occupying .009 acres of prime octopus farmland (farmwater?)

Jake explained to us that a power plant had previously been built on this site, pumping both cold and warmer ocean water on land and somehow using the temperature differential to produce electricity, which is why the site is covered in signs that say “Natural Energy Lab”.  (There’s a Wikipedia article on the concept if you’d like to understand it.)  However, in the 1970s, using diesel fuel to produce electricity became prohibitively expensive, and the plant was scrapped.  Instead, the government leases the land at cheap rates to local businesses that have a need of ocean water inputs, like the Seahorse and Octopus farms, functioning as a sort of startup incubator.  (There’s also an abalone farm, but we missed their tour, and abalone aren’t cute anyway.)  According to Jake, another business that exists here takes the water, desalinates it, and sells it as exotic Hawaiian natural water.

Anyway, like at the seahorse farm, Jake’s goal is to create a viable domestic octopus farm, although unlike at the seahorse farm, he has not yet succeeded — he hasn’t figured out what to feed the octopuses when they’re near the end of their larval stage.  He has, however, figured out how to breed octopus safely, which is important because if a female rejects a male in the wild, she will sometimes eat him.  Instead, the octopuses at the farm mate through tanks that are separated by netting, a practice Jake invented totally by accident when moving the animals into different tanks. Octopus pregnancy is more depressing than seahorse pregnancy though, because the same hormones that cause the female to hatch her eggs also kill her.  (A similar thing happens to the male octopus, whose hormones result in promiscuity followed shortly after by death.)  It’s quite a contrast from the constantly-pregnant and monogamous seahorses.

On a more cheerful note, at the octopus farm, you can see octopus in their tanks and stick your hand in and have them climb over you.  The octopuses all had rubber duckies and other toys but the part of their tank they seemed to enjoy the most was the drainage pipe at the bottom, which they would hide in.

The octopus farm was definitely a sleeper hit and we would give it an A+.  Jake is a very entrepreneurial sort and refuses to take any grants, because he thinks they make you lazy and complacent.  Instead, he runs the tours to finance the lab, and plans to soon start selling naming rights to the octopuses.  The lab definitely felt like Real Science — it isn’t doing p-value hacking to get a paper published or a degree, it’s a marine biologist on his own, in the middle on nowhere, trying to do something that’s never been done before, and if it works, he ends up with the only octopus farm in the world, and if it fails, he has nothing. (Actually, even if the breeding doesn’t work out, he probably has a pretty promising future running tours of the failed-octopus-farm since they’re adorable, the story’s good, and the Trip Advisor ratings are solid.)

Good luck, Jake!

After the octopus farm, we headed out to the harbor to get on a boat to Kealakekua Bay, which is supposed to have some of the best snorkeling on the island, and is not overcrowded because it can only be reached via boat or a lengthy hike.  While the snorkeling was good — notably we saw schools of needle-like fish that hovered only an inch or two below the surface — it made me appreciate the hotel snorkeling a lot more.  We both agreed that while Kealakekua Bay was nice, it was not worth the hassle of getting there.

Our next stop was Place of Refuge, a historical park that was a holy Hawaiian site where people who had broken a taboo, like eating the wrong kind of banana or walking on ground that a chief had walked on, could go to to be absolved by the high priest and thus avoid a death penalty. 

Honestly the park kind of sucked.  It is a boring and underexplained stroll through some artifacts that does not explain a whole lot and raises more questions than it answers, like, “how did people know that the priest had absolved you, and how did they know you had broken a kapu anyway?  Did people really care that much about kapus?”  The exhibit makes it sound as if Kamehameha II publicly broke kapu, and that ended the kapu system, in the same way that a person might say that Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of a church and that ended the hegemony of the Catholic Church.  In reality, I suspect the situation was much more complex.  I remember a former co-worker who had spent time with some tribes in New Guinea, and told us about their taboo and magic beliefs -- from his description, it seemed largely like an excuse to legally kill people who nobody liked.  I found myself wondering if kapu in Hawaii worked the same way -- especially since you're on a smallish island where you can't just kick people out and make them go somewhere else.

By far the most fun we had at the park was playing a traditional Hawaiian game called Konane - it’s a bit like checkers (in that pieces jump over and capture other pieces), and the objective is to be the last player to make a jump. Alex lost.

Also pictured: The aloha shirt from the seahorse farm