How to Anesthetize an Octopus

Abstract Recent progress in animal welfare legislation relating to invertebrates has provoked interest in methods for the anesthesia of cephalopods, for which different approaches to anesthesia have been tried but in most cases without truly anesthetizing the animals. For example, several workers have used muscle relaxants or hypothermia as forms of “anesthesia.” Several inhalational anesthetics are known to act in a dose-dependent manner on the great pond snail Lymnaea stagnalis, a pulmonate mollusk. Here we report, for the first time, on the effects of clinical doses of the well-known inhalational clinical anesthetic isoflurane on the behavioral responses of the common octopus Octopus vulgaris.