Comment by EdwardDiego
3 months ago
My wife and I wish our country didn't have such restrictive biosecurity laws, because AWWW THEIR CUTE LITTLE HANDS....
(I mean, there's good reasons my country does have those laws, and I don't _really_ want to have a wild animal as a pet, but I kinda do.)
on the other side - if not for these laws, somebody would have produced a pet racoon breed in several generations, smth like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox#/media... (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox)
I want to breed octopus to live longer.
Then identify the "morph", the gene cluster, that did the trick in the initial species, to speed up the uplift for the rest of them.
But given how intelligent they are, and how much they learn in their short lifetimes, completely self-directed and self-learning highly curious autodidact geniuses from the moment they escape their tiny egg, a race of long lived octopuses without learning brakes might be an existential threat for us.
Or they might create a magical ocean civilization. There are octopus species everywhere. Deepest ocean floor, under the polar cap, even a "land" species that lives on the beach. Everywhere from sea level down.
Death follows mating for the males and the eggs hatching for the females. Not an uncommon behavior, all sorts of plants (ie agave) and animals (ie salmon) have a similar strategy. Meaning the strategy works very well, and would likely be controlled by very different genes, depending on the species.
Changing this "death gene" via a breeding program is likely to fail, but could perhaps be accomplished via gene editing like CRISPR.
Another approach would be delaying sexual maturity. Doubling the lifespan to something like 4-5 years in the common octopus would have very interesting results. However, doubling the lifespan would effectively halve the number of offspring, meaning these mutants would be less competitive, compared to their wild relatives. This could be seen as the needed safeguard to prevent a race of highly intelligent mollusks from taking our planetary domination crown.
So all in all, delaying sexual maturity seems to be the better way to go for your project.
Do keep us updated on the advancement.
1 reply →