- Joined
- Aug 17, 2005
- Messages
- 304
As I embarked on a mental adventure the other day, I started thinking about the how to solve the problem of curbing collecting of sensitive species. It seems that flat-out bans seldom work very effectively (Prohibition, any bans on drugs, etc...) as long as there is a strong market demand. Curbing market demand also seems to seldom work if you simply try to tell people what they should and shouldn't buy. They will end up purchasing what they really want in the end.
SO, that led me to think. What if someone where to simply genetically engineer the "perfect" octopus:
So lets use an illustration. Lets start with something that is relatively easy to breed in captivity like O. bimaculoides with benthic juveniles. One could replace the gene(s) for a single set of chromatophores with photophores, so now we have a bioluminescent bimac. That alone would probably make them fairly popular. In addition, for environmental reasons, we could knock-out a gene that is necessary for the biosynthesis of some essential nutrient. That way, one would have to supplement that nutrient in the diet and if they escaped into the wild there is very minimal chance of them out competeing native cephs. (special octo-food that you have to buy from the breeders might even make the market more viable).
The point is that many things could potentially be done to modify appearance octopuses to make a more marketable ceph, and in turn decrease the pressure on certain wild stocks. My question to all of you reading this is... what would be the ethical implications of such a venture.
(Also, before any jumps on me, I know that untill the ceph genome is sequenced, any of this work would be prohibitively slow, and might even be after such sequencing. However, there are proof-of-concept examples of the things that I have tossed out in other organisms.)
SO, that led me to think. What if someone where to simply genetically engineer the "perfect" octopus:
So lets use an illustration. Lets start with something that is relatively easy to breed in captivity like O. bimaculoides with benthic juveniles. One could replace the gene(s) for a single set of chromatophores with photophores, so now we have a bioluminescent bimac. That alone would probably make them fairly popular. In addition, for environmental reasons, we could knock-out a gene that is necessary for the biosynthesis of some essential nutrient. That way, one would have to supplement that nutrient in the diet and if they escaped into the wild there is very minimal chance of them out competeing native cephs. (special octo-food that you have to buy from the breeders might even make the market more viable).
The point is that many things could potentially be done to modify appearance octopuses to make a more marketable ceph, and in turn decrease the pressure on certain wild stocks. My question to all of you reading this is... what would be the ethical implications of such a venture.
(Also, before any jumps on me, I know that untill the ceph genome is sequenced, any of this work would be prohibitively slow, and might even be after such sequencing. However, there are proof-of-concept examples of the things that I have tossed out in other organisms.)