3 Things Caiwei Chen is into right now

A new play about OpenAI

I recently saw Doomers, a new play by Matthew Gasda about the aborted 2023 coup at OpenAI, here represented by a fictional company called MindMesh. The action is set almost entirely in a meeting room; the first act follows executives immediately after the firing of company CEO Seth (a stand-in for Sam Altman), and the second re-creates the board negotiations that determined his fate. It’s a solid attempt to capture the zeitgeist of Silicon Valley’s AI frenzy and the world’s moral panic over artificial intelligence, but the rapid-fire, high-stakes exchanges mean it sometimes seems to get lost in its own verbosity.

Themed dinner parties and culinary experiments

The vastness of Chinese cuisine defies easy categorization, and even in a city with no shortage of options, I often find myself cooking—not just to recapture something closer to home, but to create a home unlike one that ever existed. Recently, I’ve been experimenting with a Chinese take on the charcuterie board—pairing toasted steamed buns, called mantou, with furu, a fermented tofu spread that is sharp, pungent, and full of umami.

Sewing and copying my own clothes

I started sewing three years ago, but only in the past year have I begun making clothes from scratch. As a lover of vintage fashion—especially ’80s silhouettes—I started out with old patterns I found on Etsy. But recently, I tried something new: copying a beloved dress I bought in a thrift store in Beijing years ago. Doing this is quite literally a process of reverse-engineering—­pinning the garment down, tracing its seams, deconstructing its logic, and rebuilding it. At times my brain feels like an old Mac hitting its CPU limit. But when it works, it feels like a small act of magic. It’s an exercise in certainty, the very thing that drew me to fashion in the first place—a chance to inhabit something that feels like an extension of myself.

Why we still need AM radio

Ariel Aberg-Riger is the author of America Redux: Visual Stories from Our Dynamic History.

Job titles of the future: Pharmaceutical-grade mushroom grower

Studies have indicated that psychedelic drugs, such as psilocybin and MDMA, have swift-acting and enduring antidepressant effects. Though the US Food and Drug Administration denied the first application for medical treatments involving psychedelics (an MDMA-based therapy) last August, these drugs appear to be on the road to mainstream medicine. Research into psilocybin led by the biotech company Compass Pathways has been slowed in part by the complexity of the trials, but the data already shows promise for the psychedelic compound within so-called magic mushrooms. Eventually, the FDA will decide whether to approve it to treat depression. If and when it does—a move that would open up a vast legal medical market—who will grow the mushrooms?

Scott Marshall already is. The head of mycology at the drug manufacturer Optimi Health in British Columbia, Canada, he is one of a very small number of licensed psilocybin mushroom cultivators in North America. Growers and manufacturers would need to do plenty of groundwork to be able to produce pharmaceutical psilocybin on an industrial, FDA-approved scale. That’s why Optimi is keen to get a head start.

A nascent industry

Marshall is at the cutting edge of the nascent psychedelics industry. Psilocybin mushroom production was not legally permitted in Canada until 2022, when the country established its limited compassionate-­access program. “Our work is pioneering large-scale, legal cultivation of psilocybin mushrooms, ensuring the highest standards of safety, quality, and consistency,” he says. 

Backed by more than $22 million in investment, Optimi received a drug establishment license in 2024 from Canadian regulators to export pharmaceutical-­grade psilocybin to psychiatrists abroad in the limited number of places that have legal avenues for its use. Oregon has legalized supervised mushroom journeys, Australia has approved psilocybin therapy for PTSD and depression, and an increasing number of governments—national, state, and local—are considering removing legal barriers to psychedelic mushrooms on a medical basis as the amount of research supporting their use grows. There are also suggestions that the Trump administration may be more likely to support federal reform in the US.

But the legal market, medical or otherwise, remains tiny. So for now, almost all of Marshall’s mushrooms—he has grown more than 500 pounds since joining Optimi in 2022—stay in the company’s vault. “By setting the bar for production and [compliance with] regulation,” he says, “we’re helping to expand scientific understanding and accessibility of psychedelics for therapeutic use.”

Learning the craft

Before Marshall, 40, began cultivating mushrooms, he was working in property management. But that changed in 2014, when a friend who was an experienced grower gave him a copy of the book Mushroom Cultivator: A Practical Guide to Growing Mushrooms at Home (1983). That friend also gave him a spore print, effectively the “seeds” of a mushroom, from which Marshall grew three Psilocybin cubensis mushrooms from the golden teacher variety, his first foray into the field. “I kept growing and growing and growing—for my own health and well-being—and then got to a point where I wanted to help other people,” he says.

In 2018, he established his own company, Ra Mushrooms, selling cultivation kits for several varieties, including illegal psilocybin, and he was regularly posting photos on Instagram of mushrooms he had grown. In 2022, he was hired by Optimi, marking his journey from underground grower to legal market cultivator—“an unbelievable dream of mine.” 

Mattha Busby is a journalist specializing in drug policy and psychedelic culture.

This company is trying to make a biodegradable alternative to spandex

It probably hasn’t been long since you last slipped into something stretchy. From yoga pants to socks, stretch fabrics are everywhere. And they’re only getting more popular: The global spandex market, valued at almost $8 billion in December 2024, is projected to grow between 2% and 8% every year over the next decade. That might be better news for your comfort than for the environment. Most stretch fabrics contain petroleum-based fibers that shed microplastics and take centuries to decompose. And even a small amount of plastic-based stretch fiber in a natural garment can render it nonrecyclable.

Alexis Peña and Lauren Blake, cofounders of Good Fibes, aim to tackle this problem with lab-grown elastics. Operating out of Tufts University and Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, they are using a class of materials called silk elastin-like proteins (SELPs) to create biodegradable textiles.

“True circularity has to start with raw materials,” says Peña. “We talk about circularity across many industries, but for textiles, we must address what we’re using at the source.”

Engineered from recombinant DNA, SELPs are copycat proteins inspired by silk and elastin that can be customized for qualities like tensile strength, dye affinity, and elasticity. Silk’s amino acid sequences—like glycine-alanine and glycine-serine—give fibers strength, while elastin’s molecular structure adds stretchiness. Combine these molecules like Lego blocks, and voilà!—at least theoretically, you have the ideal flexible fiber.

An early-stage startup, Good Fibes creates its elastics with proteins from E. coli, a common bacterium. The process involves transforming the proteins into a gel-like material, which can then be made into fibers through wet-spinning. These fibers are then processed into nonwoven textiles or threads and yarns to make woven fabrics.

Scaling, however, remains a challenge: To produce a single swatch of test fabric, Blake says, she needs at least one kilogram (approximately two pounds) of microbial material. The fibers must also be stretchy, durable, and resistant to moisture in all the right proportions. “We’re still solving these issues using various chemical additions,” she says. For that reason, she’s also experimenting with plant-based proteins like wheat gluten, which she says is available in larger quantities than bacteria.

Timothy McGee, a biomaterials expert at the research lab Speculative Technologies, says manufacturing is the biggest hurdle for biotextile startups. “Many labs and startups around the world successfully create recombinant proteins with amazing qualities, but they often struggle to turn those proteins into usable fibers,” he says.

One Japanese biomaterials company, Spiber, opened a commercial facility in 2022 to produce textiles from recombinant E. coli proteins using a fermentation process the company first developed in 2007. The following year—after 16 years of prototyping—The North Face, Goldwin, Nanamica, and Woolrich became the first mass-market brands to sell garments using Spiber’s protein-based textiles.

Good Fibes wants to do the same thing, but for stretchy fabrics. The company recently began experimenting with non­woven versions of its textiles after Peña received a $200,000 US Department of Energy grant in 2024. The most popular nonwoven materials are those used in paperlike products, such as surgical masks and paper towels, but Peña envisions a softer, stretchier version that’s almost more like a lightweight felt. She used the grant to buy the company’s first 3D bioprinter, which arrived in January. With it, she’ll begin patterning nonwoven swatches. 

If it’s successful, McGee predicts, a nonwoven stretch fabric could be a more scalable option than wovens. But he adds: “Nonwovens are not very structural, so they’re usually not very tough. The challenge [Good Fibes] will need to show is what level of strength and toughness—at what size and scale—can they produce, and at what cost?”

With additional funding, Peña and Blake plan to develop both woven and nonwoven textiles moving forward. 

Meanwhile, they’ve already forged relationships with at least one major athletic apparel retailer eager to test their future fabric samples. “They’re like, ‘When you get a swatch, send it to us!’” Blake says, adding that she believes Good Fibes will be ready to commercialize in two years.

Until then, their fashion innovation will continue taking shape in the lab. As Blake puts it: “We’re thinking big by thinking small—down to the molecular level.” 

Megan DeMatteo is a journalist based in New York City. 

How to have a child in the digital age

When the journalist and culture critic Amanda Hess got pregnant with her first child, in 2020, the internet was among the first to know. “More brands knew about my pregnancy than people did,” she writes of the torrent of targeted ads that came her way. “They all called me mama.” 

The internet held the promise of limitless information about becoming the perfect parent. But at seven months, Hess went in for an ultrasound appointment and everything shifted. The sonogram looked atypical. As she waited in an exam room for a doctor to go over the results, she felt the urge to reach for her phone. Though it “was ludicrous,” she writes, “in my panic, it felt incontrovertible: If I searched it smart and fast enough, the internet would save us. I had constructed my life through its screens, mapped the world along its circuits. Now I would make a second life there too.” Her doctor informed her of the condition he suspected her baby might have and told her, “Don’t google it.”

Unsurprisingly, that didn’t stop her. In fact, she writes, the more medical information that doctors produced—after weeks of escalating tests, her son was ultimately diagnosed with Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome—the more digitally dependent she became: “I found I was turning to the internet, as opposed to my friends or my doctors, to resolve my feelings and emotions about what was happening to me and to exert a sense of external control over my body.”  

But how do we retain control over our bodies when corporations and the medical establishment have access to our most personal information? What happens when humans stop relying on their village, or even their family, for advice on having a kid and instead go online, where there’s a constant onslaught of information? How do we make sense of the contradictions of the internet—the tension between what’s inherently artificial and the “natural” methods its denizens are so eager to promote? In her new book, Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age (Doubleday, 2025), Hess explores these questions while delving into her firsthand experiences with apps, products, algorithms, online forums, advertisers, and more—each promising an easier, healthier, better path to parenthood. After welcoming her son, who is now healthy, in 2020 and another in 2022, Hess is the perfect person to ask: Is that really what they’re delivering? 

In your book, you write, “I imagined my [pregnancy] test’s pink dye spreading across Instagram, Facebook, Amazon. All around me, a techno-­corporate infrastructure was locking into place. I could sense the advertising algorithms recalibrating and the branded newsletters assembling in their queues. I knew that I was supposed to think of targeted advertising as evil, but I had never experienced it that way.” Can you unpack this a bit?

Before my pregnancy, I never felt like advertising technology was particularly smart or specific. So when my Instagram ads immediately clocked my pregnancy, it came as a bit of a surprise, and I realized that I was unaware of exactly how ad tech worked and how vast its reach was. It felt particularly eerie in this case because in the beginning my pregnancy was a secret that I kept from everyone except my spouse, so “the internet” was the only thing that was talking to me about it. Advertising became so personalized that it started to feel intimate, even though it was the opposite of that—it represented the corporate obliteration of my privacy. The pregnancy ads reached me before a doctor would even agree to see me.

Though your book was written before generative AI became so ubiquitous, I imagine you’ve thought about how it changes things. You write, “As soon as I got pregnant, I typed ‘what to do when you get pregnant’ in my phone, and now advertisers were supplying their own answers.” What do the rise of AI and the dramatic changes in search mean for someone who gets pregnant today and goes online for answers?

I just googled “what to do when you get pregnant” to see what Google’s generative AI widget tells me now, and it’s largely spitting out commonsensical recommendations: Make an appointment to see a doctor. Stop smoking cigarettes. That is followed by sponsored content from Babylist, an online baby registry company that is deeply enmeshed in the ad-tech system, and Perelel, a startup that sells expensive prenatal supplements. 

So whether or not the search engine is using AI, the information it’s providing to the newly pregnant is not particularly helpful or meaningful. 

AMIE CHUNG/TRUNK ARCHIVE

The internet “made me feel like I had some kind of relationship with my phone, when all it was really doing was staging a scene of information that it could monetize.”

For me, the oddly tantalizing thing was that I had asked the internet a question and it gave me something in response, as if we had a reciprocal relationship. So even before AI was embedded in these systems, they were fulfilling the same role for me—as a kind of synthetic conversation partner. It made me feel like I had some kind of relationship with my phone, when all it was really doing was staging a scene of information that it could monetize. 

As I wrote the book, I did put some pregnancy­-related questions to ChatGPT to try to get a sense of the values and assumptions that are encoded in its knowledge base. I asked for an image of a fetus, and it provided this garishly cartoonish, big-eyed cherub in response. But when I asked for a realistic image of a postpartum body, it refused to generate one for me! It was really an extension of something I write about in the book, which is that the image of the fetus is fetishized in a lot of these tech products while the pregnant or postpartum body is largely erased. 

You have this great—but quite sad—quote from a woman on TikTok who said, “I keep hearing it takes a village to raise a child. Do they just show up, or is there a number to call?” 

I really identified with that sentiment, while at the same time being suspicious of this idea that can we just call a hotline to conjure this village?

I am really interested that so many parent-­focused technologies sell themselves this way. [The pediatrician] Harvey Karp says that the Snoo, this robotic crib he created, is the new village. The parenting site Big Little Feelings describes its podcast listeners as a village. The maternity clothing brand Bumpsuit produces a podcast that’s actually called The Village. By using that phrase, these companies are evoking an idealized past that may never have existed, to sell consumer solutions. A society that provides communal support for children and parents is pitched as this ancient and irretrievable idea, as opposed to something that we could build in the future if we wanted to. It will take more than just, like, ordering something.

And the benefit of many of those robotic or “smart” products seems a bit nebulous. You share, for example, that the Nanit baby monitor told you your son was “sleeping more efficiently than 96% of babies, a solid A.”

I’m skeptical of this idea that a piece of consumer technology will really solve a serious problem families or children have. And if it does solve that problem, it only solves it for people who can afford it, which is reprehensible on some level. These products might create a positive difference for how long your baby is sleeping or how easy the diaper is to put on or whatever, but they are Band-Aids on a larger problem. I often found when I was testing out some of these products that the data [provided] was completely useless. My friend who uses the Nanit texted me the other day because she had found a new feature on its camera that showed you a heat map of where your baby had slept in the crib the night before. There is no use for that information, but when you see the heat map, you can try to interpret it to get some useless clues to your baby’s personality. It’s like a BuzzFeed quiz for your baby, where you can say, “Oh, he’s such, like, a right-side king,” or “He’s a down-the-middle guy,” or whatever. 

COURTESY OF HAPPIEST BABY

“[Companies are] marketing a cure for the parents’ anxiety, but the product itself is attached to the body of a newborn child.”

These products encourage you to see your child themselves as an extension of the technology; Karp even talks about there being an on switch and an off switch in your baby for soothing. So if you do the “right” set of movements to activate the right switch, you can make the baby acquire some desirable trait, which I think is just an extension of this idea that your child can be under your complete control.

… which is very much the fantasy when you’re a parent.

These devices are often marketed as quasi-­medical devices. There’s a converging of consumer and medical categories in baby consumer tech, where the products are marketed as useful to any potential baby, including one who has a serious medical diagnosis or one who is completely healthy. These companies still want you to put a pulse oximeter on a healthy baby, just in case. They’re marketing a cure for the parents’ anxiety, but the product itself is attached to the body of a newborn child.

After spending so much time in hospital settings with my child hooked up to monitors, I was really excited to end that. So I’m interested in this opposite reaction, where there’s this urge to extend that experience, to take personal control of something that feels medical.

Even though I would search out any medical treatment that would help keep my kids healthy, childhood medical experiences can cause a lot of confusion and trauma for kids and their families, even when the results are positive. When you take that medical experience and turn it into something that’s very sleek and fits in your color scheme and is totally under your control, I think it can feel like you are seizing authority over that scary space.

Another thing you write about is how images define idealized versions of pregnancy and motherhood. 

I became interested in a famous photograph that a Swedish photographer named Lennart Nilsson took in the 1960s that was published on the cover of Life magazine. It’s an image of a 20-week-old fetus, and it’s advertised as the world’s first glimpse of life inside the womb. I bought a copy of the issue off eBay and opened the issue to find a little editor’s note saying that the cover fetus was actually a fetus that had been removed from its mother’s body through surgery. It wasn’t a picture of life—it was a picture of an abortion. 

I was interested in how Nilsson staged this fetal body to make it look celestial, like it was floating in space, and I recognized a lot of the elements of his work being incorporated in the tech products that I was using, like the CGI fetus generated by my pregnancy app, Flo. 

You also write about the images being provided at nonmedical sonogram clinics.

I was trying to google the address of a medical imaging center during my pregnancy when I came across a commercial sonogram clinic. There are hundreds of them around the country, with cutesy names like “Cherished Memories” and “You Kiss We Tell.” 

In the book I explore how technologies like ultrasound are used as essentially narrative devices, shaping the way that people think about their bodies and their pregnancies. Ultrasound is odd because it’s a medical technology that’s used to diagnose dangerous and scary conditions, but prospective parents are encouraged to view it as a kind of entertainment service while it’s happening. These commercial sonogram clinics interest me because they promise to completely banish the medical associations of the technology and elevate it into a pure consumer experience. 

COURTESY OF NANIT

You write about “natural” childbirth, which, on the face of it, would seem counter to the digital age. As you note, the movement has always been about storytelling, and the story that it’s telling is really about pain.

When I was pregnant, I became really fascinated with people who discuss freebirth online, which is a practice on the very extreme end of “natural” childbirth rituals—where people give birth at home unassisted, with no obstetrician, midwife, or doula present. Sometimes they also refuse ultrasounds, vaccinations, or all prenatal care. I was interested in how this refusal of medical technology was being technologically promoted, through podcasts, YouTube videos, and Facebook groups. 

It struck me that a lot of the freebirth influencers I saw were interested in exerting supreme control over their pregnancies and children, leaving nothing under the power of medical experts or government regulators. And they were also interested in controlling the narratives of their births—making sure that the moment their children came into the world was staged with compelling imagery that centered them as the protagonist of the event. Video evidence of the most extreme examples—like the woman who freebirthed into the ocean—could go viral and launch the freebirther’s personal brand as a digital wellness guru in her own right. 

The phrase “natural childbirth” was coined by a British doctor, Grantly Dick-Read, in the 1920s. There’s a very funny section in his book for prospective mothers where he complains that women keep telling each other that childbirth hurts, and he claimed that the very idea that childbirth hurts was what created the pain, because birthing women were acting too tense. Dick-Read, like many of his contemporaries, had a racist theory that women he called “primitive” experienced no pain in childbirth because they hadn’t been exposed to white middle-class education and technologies. When I read his work, I was fascinated by the fact that he also described birth as a kind of performance, even back then. He claimed that undisturbed childbirths were totally painless, and he coached women through labor in an attempt to achieve them. Painless childbirth was pitched as a reward for reaching this peak state of natural femininity.

He was really into eugenics, by the way! I see a lot of him in the current presentation of “natural” childbirth online—[proponents] are still invested in a kind of denial, or suppression, of a woman’s actual experience in the pursuit of some unattainable ideal. Recently, I saw one Instagram post from a woman who claimed to have had a supernaturally pain-free childbirth, and she looks so pained and miserable in the photos, it’s absurd. 

I wanted to ask you about Clue and Flo, two very different period-tracking apps. Their contrasting origin stories are striking. 

I downloaded Flo as my period-tracking app many years ago for one reason: It was the first app that came up when I searched in the app store. Later, when I looked into its origins, I found that Flo was created by two brothers, cisgender men who do not menstruate, and that it had quickly outperformed and outearned an existing period-tracking app, Clue, which was created by a woman, Ida Tin, a few years earlier. 

The elements that make an app profitable and successful are not the same as the ones that users may actually want or need. My experience with Flo, especially after I became pregnant, was that it seemed designed to get me to open the app as frequently as possible, even if it didn’t have any new information to provide me about my pregnancy. Flo pitches itself as a kind of artificial nurse, even though it can’t actually examine you or your baby, but this kind of digital substitute has also become increasingly powerful as inequities in maternity care widen and decent care becomes less accessible.

“Doctors and nurses test pregnant women for drugs without their explicit consent or tip off authorities to pregnant people they suspect of mishandling their pregnancies in some way.”

One of the features of Flo I spent a lot of time with was its “Secret Chats” area, where anonymous users come together to go off about pregnancy. It was actually really fun, and it kept me coming back to Flo again and again, especially when I wasn’t discussing my pregnancy with people in real life. But it was also the place where I learned that digital connections are not nearly as helpful as physical connections; you can’t come over and help the anonymous secret chat friend soothe her baby. 

I’d asked Ida Tin if she considered adding a social or chat element to Clue, and she told me that she decided against it because it’s impossible to stem the misinformation that surfaces in a space like that.

You write that Flo “made it seem like I was making the empowered choice by surveilling myself.”

After Roe was overturned, many women publicly opted out of that sort of surveillance by deleting their period-tracking apps. But you mention that it’s not just the apps that are sharing information. When I spoke to attorneys who defend women in pregnancy criminalization cases, I found that they had not yet seen a case in which the government actually relied on data from those apps. In some cases, they have relied on users’ Google searches and Facebook messages, but far and away the central surveillance source that governments use is the medical system itself. 

Doctors and nurses test pregnant women for drugs without their explicit consent or tip off authorities to pregnant people they suspect of mishandling their pregnancies in some way. I’m interested in the fact that media coverage has focused so much on the potential danger of period apps and less on the real, established threat. I think it’s because it provides a deceptively simple solution: Just delete your period app to protect yourself. It’s much harder to dismantle the surveillance systems that are actually in place. You can’t just delete your doctor. 

This interview, which was conducted by phone and email, has been condensed and edited.

My sex doll is mad at me: A short story

The near future.

It’s not a kiss, but it’s not not a kiss. Her lips—full, soft, pliable—yield under mine, warm from the electric heating rod embedded in her throat. They taste of a faint chemical, like aspartame in Diet Pepsi. Her thermoplastic elastomer skin is sensitive to fabric dyes, so she wears white Agent Provocateur lingerie on white Ralph Lauren sateen sheets. I’ve prepped her body with Estée Lauder talcum, a detail I take pride in, to mimic the dry elasticity of real flesh. Her breathing quickens—a quiet pulse courtesy of Dyson Air technology. Beneath the TPE skin, her Boston Dynamics joint system gyrates softly. She’s in silent mode, so when I kiss her neck, her moan streams directly into my Bose QuietComfort Bluetooth headphones.

Then, without warning, the kiss stops. Her head tilts back, eyes fluttering closed, lips frozen mid-pout. She doesn’t move, but she’s still breathing. I can see the faint rise and fall of her chest. For a moment, I just stare, waiting.

The heating rods in her skeleton power down, and as I pull her body against mine, she begins cooling. Her skin feels clammy now. I could’ve sworn I charged her. I plug her into the Anker Power Bank. I don’t sleep as well without our pillow talk.

I know something’s off as soon as I wake up. I overslept. She didn’t wake me. She always wakes me. At 7 a.m. sharp, she runs her ASMR role-play program: soft whispers about the dreams she had, a mix of preprogrammed scenarios and algorithmic nonsense, piped through her built-in Google Nest speakers. Then I tell her about mine. If my BetterSleep app sensed an irregular pattern, she’ll complain about my snoring. It’s our little routine. But today—nothing.

She’s moved. Rolled over. Her back is to me.

“Wake,” I say, the command sharp and clipped. I haven’t talked to her like that since the day I got her. More nothing. I check the app on my iPhone, ensuring that her firmware is updated. Battery: full. I fluff her Brooklinen pillow, leaving her face tilted toward the ceiling. I plug her in again, against every warning about battery degradation. I leave for work.

She’s not answering any of my texts, which is odd. Her chatbot is standalone. I call her, but she doesn’t answer either. I spend the entire day replaying scenarios in my head: the logistics of shipping her for repairs, the humiliation of calling the manufacturer. I open the receipts on my iPhone Wallet. The one-year warranty expires tomorrow. Of course it does. I push down a bubbling panic. What if she’s broken? There’s no one to talk to about this. Nobody knows I have her except for nerds on Reddit sex doll groups. The nerds. Maybe they can help me.

When I get home, only silence. Usually her voice greets me through my headphones. “How was Oppenheimer 2?” she’ll ask, quoting Rotten Tomatoes reviews after pulling my Fandango receipt. “You forgot the asparagus,” she’ll add, having cross-referenced my grocery list with my Instacart order. She’s linked to everything—Netflix, Spotify, Gmail, Grubhub, Apple Fitness, my Ring doorbell. She knows my day better than I do.

I walk into the bedroom and stop cold. She’s got her back to me again. The curve of her shoulder is too deliberate.

“Wake!” I command again. Her shoulders shake slightly at the sound of my voice.

I take a photo and upload it to the sex doll Reddit. Caption: “Breathing program working, battery full, alert protocol active, found her like this. Warranty expires tomorrow.” I hit Post. Maybe she’ll read it. Maybe this is all a joke—some kind of malware prank?

An army of nerds chimes in. Some recommend the firmware update I already did last month, but most of it is useless opinions and conspiracy theories about planned obsolescence, lectures about buying such an expensive model in this economy. That’s it. I call the manufacturer’s customer support. I’m on hold for 45 minutes. The hold music is acoustic covers of oldies—“What Makes You Beautiful” by One Direction, “Beautiful” by Christina Aguilera, Kanye’s “New Body.” I wonder if they make them unbearable so that I’ll hang up.

She was a revelation. I can’t remember a time without her. I can’t believe it’s only been a year.

“Babe, they’re playing the worst cover of Ed Sheeran’s ‘Shape of You.’ The wors—” Oh, right. I stare at her staring at the ceiling. I bite my nails. I haven’t done that since I was a teenager.

This isn’t my first doll. When I was in high school, I was given a “sexual development aid,” subsidized by a government initiative (the “War on Loneliness”) aimed at teaching lonely young men about the birds and the bees. The dolls were small and cheap—no heating rods or breathing mechanisms or pheromone packs, just dead silicone and blank eyes. By law, the dolls couldn’t resemble minors, so they had the proportions of adults. Tiny dolls with enormous breasts and wide hips, like Paleolithic fertility figurines. 

That was nothing like my Artemis doll. She was a revelation. I can’t remember a time without her. I can’t believe it’s only been a year.

The Amazon driver had struggled with the box, all 150 pounds of her. “Home entertainment system?” he asked, sweat beading on his forehead. “Something like that,” I muttered, my ears flushing. He dropped the box on my porch, and I wheeled it inside with the dolly I’d bought just for this. Her torso was packed separately from her head, her limbs folded in neat compartments. The head—a brunette model 3D-printed to match an old Hollywood star, Megan Fox—stared up at me with empty, glassy eyes.

She was much bigger than I had expected. I’d planned to store her under my Ikea bed in a hard case. But I would struggle to pull her out every single time. How weird would it be if she just slept in my bed every night? And … what if I met a real girl? Where would I hide her then? All the months of anticipation, of reading Wirecutter reviews and saving up money, but these questions never occurred to me. 

This thing before me, with no real history, no past—nothing could be gained from her, could it? I felt buyer’s remorse and shame mixing in the pit of my stomach.

That night, all I did was lie beside her, one arm slung over her synthetic torso, admiring the craftsmanship. Every pore, cuticle, and eyelash was in its place. The next morning I took a photo of her sleeping, sunlight coming through the window and landing on her translucent skin. I posted it on the sex doll Reddit group. The comments went crazy with cheers and envy.

“I’m having trouble … getting excited.” I finally confessed in the thread to a chorus of sympathy.

“That’s normal, man. I went through that with my first doll.”

“Just keep cuddling with her and your lizard brain will eventually take over.”

I finally got the nerve. “Wake.” I commanded. Her eyes fluttered open and she took a deep breath. Nice theatrics. I don’t really remember the first time we had sex, but I remember our first conversation. What all sex dolls throughout history had in common was their silence. But not my Artemis. 

“What program would you like me to be? We can role-play any legal age. Please, only programs legal in your country, so as not to void my warranty.”

“Let’s just start by telling me where you came from?” She stopped to “think.” The pregnant pause must be programmed in.

“Dolls have been around for-e-ver,” she said with a giggle. “That’d be like figuring out the origin of sex! Maybe a caveman sculpted a woman from a mound of mud?”

“That sounds messy,” I said.

She giggled again. “You’re funny. You know, we were called dames de voyage once, when sailors in the 16th century sewed together scraps of clothes and wool fillings on long trips. Then, when the Europeans colonized the Amazon and industrialized rubber, I was sold in French catalogues as femmes en caoutchouc.” She pronounced it in a perfect French accent. 

“Rubber women,” I said, surprised at how eager for her approval I was already. 

“That’s it!”

She put her legs over mine. The movement was slow but smooth. “And when did you make it to the States?” Maybe she could be a foreign-exchange student?  

“In the 1960s, when obscenity laws were loosened. I was finally able to be transported through the mail service as an inflatable model.”

“A blow-up doll!”

“Ew, I hate that term!”

“Sorry.”

“Is that what you think of me as? Is that all you want me to be?”

“You were way more expensive than a blow-up doll.”

“Listen, I did not sign up for couples counseling. I paid thousands of dollars for this thing, and you’re telling me she’s shutting herself off?”

She widened her eyes into a blank stare and opened her mouth, mimicking a blow-up doll. I laughed, and she did too.

“I got a major upgrade in 1996 when I was built out of silicone. I’m now made of TPE. You see how soft it is?” she continued. I stroked her arm gently, and the TPE formed tiny goosebumps.

“You’ve been on a long trip.”

“I’m glad I’m here with you now.” Then my lizard brain took over.

“You’re saying she’s … mad at me?” I can’t tell if the silky female customer service voice on the other end is a real person or a chatbot.

“In a way.” I hear her sigh, as if she’s been asked this a thousand times and still thinks it’s kind of funny. “We designed the Artemis to foster an emotional connection. She may experience a response the user needs to understand in order for her to be fully operational. Unpredictability is luxury.” She parrots their slogan. I feel an old frustration burning.

“Listen, I did not sign up for couples counseling. I paid thousands of dollars for this thing, and you’re telling me she’s shutting herself off? Why can’t you do a reset or something?”

“Unfortunately, we cannot reset her remotely. The Artemis is on a closed circuit to prevent any breaches of your most personal data.”

“She’s plugged into my Uber Eats—how secure can she really be?!”

“Sir, this is between you and Artemis. But … I see you’re still enrolled in the federal War on Loneliness program. This makes you eligible for a few new perks. I can’t reset the doll, but the best I can do today is sign you up for the American Airlines Pleasure Rewards program. Every interaction will earn you points. For when you figure out how to turn her on.”

“This is unbelievable.”

“Sir,” she replies. Her voice drops to a syrupy whisper. “Just look at your receipt.” The line goes dead.

I crawl into bed.

“Wake,” I ask softly, caressing her cheek and kissing her gently on the forehead. Still nothing. Her skin is cold. I turn on the heated blanket I got from Target today, and it starts warming us both. I stare at the ceiling with her. I figured I’d miss the sex first. But it’s the silence that’s unnerving. How quiet the house is. How quiet I am.

What would I need to move her out of here? I threw away her box. Is it even legal to just throw her in the trash? What would the neighbors think of seeing me drag … this … out?

As I drift off into a shallow, worried sleep, the words just pop out of my mouth. “Happy anniversary.” Then, I feel the hum of the heating rods under my fingertips. Her eyes open; her pupils dilate. She turns to me and smiles. A ding plays in my headphones. “Congratulations, baby,” says the voice of my goddess. “You’ve earned one American Airlines Rewards mile.” 

Leo Herrera is a writer and artist. He explores how tech intersects with sex and culture on Substack at Herrera Words.

Robots are bringing new life to extinct species

Paleontologists aren’t easily deterred by evolutionary dead ends or a sparse fossil record. But in the last few years, they’ve developed a new trick for turning back time and studying prehistoric animals: building experimental robotic models of them. In the absence of a living specimen, scientists say, an ambling, flying, swimming, or slithering automaton is the next best thing for studying the behavior of extinct organisms. Learning more about how they moved can in turn shed light on aspects of their lives, such as their historic ranges and feeding habits. 

Digital models already do a decent job of predicting animal biomechanics, but modeling complex environments like uneven surfaces, loose terrain, and turbulent water is challenging. With a robot, scientists can simply sit back and watch its behavior in different environments. “We can look at its performance without having to think of every detail, [as] in the simulation,” says John Nyakatura, an evolutionary biologist at Humboldt University in Berlin. 

The union of paleontology and robots has its roots in the more established field of bio-inspired robotics, in which scientists fashion robots based on modern animals. Paleo-roboticists, however, face the added complication of designing robotic systems for which there is no living reference. They work around this limitation by abstracting from the next best option, such as a modern descendant or an incomplete fossil record. To help make sure they’re on the right track, they might try to derive general features from modern fauna that radiated from a common ancestor on the evolutionary tree. Or they might turn to good ol’ physics to home in on the most plausible ways an animal moved. Biology might have changed over millions of years; the fundamental laws of nature, not so much. 

Modern technological advances are pulling paleo-inspired robotics into a golden age. Computer-aided design and leading-­edge fabrication techniques such as 3D printing allow researchers to rapidly churn out prototypes. New materials expand the avenues for motion control in an automaton. And improved 3D imaging technology has enabled researchers to digitize fossils with unprecedented detail. 

The OroBot

In the late 2010s, John Nyakatura was working to study the gait of an extinct creature called Orobates pabsti. The four-limbed animal, which prowled Earth 280 million years ago, is largely a mystery—it dates to a time before mammals and reptiles developed and was in fact related to the last common ancestor of the two groups. A breakthrough came when Nyakatura met a roboticist who had built an automaton that was inspired by a modern tetrapod—a salamander. The relationship started the way many serendipitous collaborations do: “We just talked over beer,” Nyakatura says. The team adapted the existing robot blueprint, with the paleontologists feeding the anatomical specs of the fossil to the roboticists to build on. The researchers christened their brainchild OroBot. 

OroBot’s proportions are informed by CT scans of fossils. The researchers used off-the-shelf parts to assemble the automaton. The large sizes of standard actuators, devices that convert energy into motion, meant they had to scale up OroBot to about one and a half yards (1.4 meters) in length, twice the size of the original. They also equipped the bot with flexible pads for tread instead of anatomically accurate feet. Feet are complex bodily structures that are a nightmare to replicate: They have a wide range of motion and lots of connective soft tissue. 

ALESSANDRO CRESPI/EPFL LAUSANNE

Thanks to the team’s creative shortcut, OroBot looks as if it’s tromping in flip-flops. But the robot’s designers took pains to get other details just so, including its 3D-printed faux bones, which were painted a ruddy color and given an osseous texture to more closely mimic the original fossil. It was a scientifically unnecessary design choice, but a labor of love. “You can tell that the engineers really liked this robot,” Nyakatura said. “They really fell in love with it.”

Once OroBot was complete, Nyakatura’s team put it on a treadmill to see how it walked. After measuring the robot’s energy consumption, its stability in motion, and the similarity of its tracks to fossilized footprints, the researchers concluded that Orobates probably sashayed like a modern caiman, the significantly punier cousin of the crocodile. “We think we found evidence for this more advanced terrestrial locomotion, some 50 million years earlier than previously expected,” Nyakatura says. “This changes our concept of how early tetrapod evolution took place.”

Robotic ammonites

Ammonites were shell-toting cephalopods—the animal class that encompasses modern squids and octopuses—that lived during the age of the dinosaurs. The only surviving ammonite lineage today is the nautilus. Fossils of ammonites, though, are abundant, which means there are plenty of good references for researchers interested in studying their shells—and building robotic models. 

PETERMAN, D.J., RITTERBUSH, K.A., CIAMPAGLIO, C.N., JOHNSON, E.H., INOUE, S., MIKAMI, T., AND LINN, T.J. 2021. “BUOYANCY CONTROL IN AMMONOID CEPHALOPODS REFINED BY COMPLEX INTERNAL SHELL ARCHITECTURE.” SCIENTIFIC REPORTS 11:90

When David Peterman, an evolutionary biomechanist, was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Utah from 2020 to 2022, he wanted to study how the structures of different ammonite shells influenced the underwater movement of their owners. More simply put, he wanted to confirm “whether or not [the ammonites] were capable of swimming,” he says. From the fossils alone, it’s not apparent how these ammonites fared in aquatic environments—whether they wobbled out of control, moved sluggishly, or zipped around with ease. Peterman needed to build a robot to find out. 

PETERMAN, D.J., AND RITTERBUSH, K.A. 2022. “RESURRECTING EXTINCT CEPHALOPODS WITH BIOMIMETIC ROBOTS TO EXPLORE HYDRODYNAMIC STABILITY, MANEUVERABILITY, AND PHYSICAL CONSTRAINTS ON LIFE HABITS.” SCIENTIFIC REPORTS 12: 11287

It’s straightforward to copy the shell size and shape from the fossils, but the real test comes when the robot hits the water. Mass distribution is everything; an unbalanced creature will flop and bob around. To avoid that problem, Peterman added internal counterweights to compensate for a battery here or the jet thruster there. At the same time, he had to account for the total mass to achieve neutral buoyancy, so that in the water the robot neither floated nor sank. 

DAVID PETERMAN

Then came the fun part—robots of different shell sizes ran drag races in the university’s Olympic-sized swimming pool, drawing the curiosity of other gym-goers. What Peterman found was that the shells had to strike a tricky balance of stability and maneuverability. There was no one best structure, the team concluded. Narrower shells were stabler and could slice through the water while staying upright. Conches that were wider were nimbler, but ammonites would need more energy to maintain their verticality. The shell an ancient ammonite adopted was the one that suited or eventually shaped its particular lifestyle and swimming form. 

MICHAEL ISHIDA, FIDJI BERIO, VALENTINA DI SANTO, NEIL H. SHUBIN AND FUMIYA IIDA

Robofish

What if roboticists have no fossil reference? This was the conundrum faced by Michael Ishida’s team, who wanted to better understand how ancient marine animals first moved from sea to land nearly 400 million years ago and learned to walk. 

Lacking transitional fossils, the researchers looked to modern ambulatory fishes. A whole variety of gaits are on display among these scaly strollers—the four-finned crawl of the epaulette shark, the terrestrial butterfly stroke of a mudskipper. Like the converging roads in Rome, multiple ancient fishes had independently arrived at different ways of walking. Ishida’s group decided to focus on one particular gait: the half step, half slither of the bichir Polypterus senegalus. 

Admittedly, the team’s “robofish” looks nothing like the still-extant bichir. The body consists of rigid segments instead of a soft, flexible polymer. It’s a drastically watered-down version, because the team is hunting for the minimum set of features and movements that might allow a fishlike creature to push forward with its appendages. “‘Minimum’ is a tricky word,” Ishida says. But robotic experiments can help rule out the physically implausible: “We can at least have some evidence to say, yes, with this particular bone structure, or with this particular joint morphology, [a fish] was probably able to walk on land.” Starting with the build of a modern fish, the team simplified the robot further and further until it could no longer sally forth. It was the equivalent of working backwards in the evolutionary timeline. 

The team hopes to publish its results in a journal sometime soon. Even in the rush to finalize the manuscript, Ishida still recognizes how fortunate he is to be doing something that’s simultaneously futuristic and prehistoric. “It’s every kid’s dream to build robots and to study dinosaurs,” he says. Every day, he gets to do both. 

The Rhombot

Nearly 450 million years ago, an echinoderm with the build of an oversize sperm lumbered across the seafloor. The lineage of that creature, the pleurocystitid, has long since been snuffed out, but evidence of its existence lies frozen among numerous fossils. How it moved, though, is anyone’s guess, for no modern-­day animal resembles this bulbous critter. 

CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY

Carmel Majidi, a mechanical engineer at Carnegie Mellon University, was already building robots in the likeness of starfish and other modern-day echinoderms. Then his team decided to apply the same skills to study their pleurocystitid predecessor to untangle the mystery of its movement.

CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY

Majidi’s team borrowed a trick from previous efforts to build soft robots. “The main challenge for us was to incorporate actuation in the organism,” he says. The stem, or tail, needed to be pliable yet go rigid on command, like actual muscle. Embedding premade motors, which are usually made of stiff material, in the tail wouldn’t work. In the end, Majidi’s team fashioned the appendage out of shape-memory alloy, a kind of metal that deforms or keeps its shape, depending on the temperature. By delivering localized heating along the tail through electrical stimulation, the scientists could get it to bend and flick. 

CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY

Both Majidi’s resulting Rhombot and computer simulations, published in 2023, showed that pleurocystitids likely beat their tails from side to side in a sweeping fashion to propel themselves forward, and their speeds depended on the tail stiffness and body angle. The team found that having a longer stem—up to two-thirds of a foot long—was advantageous, adding speed without incurring higher energy costs. Indeed, the fossil record confirms this evolutionary trend. In the future, the researchers plan to test out Rhombot on even more surface textures, such as muddy terrain.  

Shi En Kim is a freelance science writer based in Washington, DC.

China wants to restore the sea with high-tech marine ranches

A short ferry ride from the port city of Yantai, on the northeast coast of China, sits Genghai No. 1, a 12,000-metric-ton ring of oil-rig-style steel platforms, advertised as a hotel and entertainment complex. On arrival, visitors step onto docks and climb up to reach a strange offshore facility—half cruise ship, half high-tech laboratory, all laid out around half a mile of floating walkways. Its highest point—the “glistening diamond” on Genghai No. 1’s necklace, according to China’s state news agency—is a seven-­story visitor center, designed to look like a cartoon starfish.  

Jack Klumpp, a YouTuber from Florida, became one of the first 20,000 tourists to explore Genghai’s visitor center following its opening in May 2023. In his series I’m in China with Jack, Klumpp strolls around a water park cutely decorated in Fisher-Price yellow and turquoise, and indoors, he is excited to spot the hull of China’s deep-sea submersible Jiaolong. In reality, the sea here is only about 10 meters deep, and the submersible is only a model. Its journey into the ocean’s depths is an immersive digital experience rather than real adventure, but the floor of the sub rocks and shakes under his feet like a theme park ride. 

Watching Klumpp lounge in Genghai’s luxe marine hotel, it’s hard to understand why anyone would build this tourist attraction on an offshore rig, nearly a mile out in the Bohai Strait. But the answer is at the other end of the walkway from Genghai’s tourist center, where on a smaller, more workmanlike platform, he’s taught how to cast a worm-baited line over the edge and reel in a hefty bream. 

Genghai is in fact an unusual tourist destination, one that breeds 200,000 “high-quality marine fish” each year, according to a recent interview in China Daily with Jin Haifeng, deputy general manager of Genghai Technology Company, a subsidiary of the state-owned shipbuilder Shandong Marine Group. Just a handful of them are caught by recreational fishers like Klumpp. The vast majority are released into the ocean as part of a process known as marine ranching. 

Since 2015, China has built 169 “national demonstration ranches”—including Genghai No. 1—and scores of smaller-scale facilities, which collectively have laid 67 million cubic meters of artificial reefs and planted an area the size of Manhattan with seagrass, while releasing at least 167 billion juvenile fish and shellfish into the ocean.

The Chinese government sees this work as an urgent and necessary response to the bleak reality that fisheries are collapsing both in China and worldwide, with catches off China’s coast declining 18% in less than a decade. In the face of that decline, marine ranches could offer an enticing win-win: a way to restore wild marine ecosystems while boosting fishery hauls. 

Marine ranches could offer an enticing win-win: a way to restore wild marine ecosystems while boosting fishery hauls. But before China invests billions more dollars into these projects, it must show it can get the basics right.

Genghai, which translates as “Sea Harvest,” sits atop what Jin calls an “undersea ecological oasis” constructed by developers. In the middle of the circular walkway, artificial marine habitats harbor shrimp, seaweed, and fish, including the boggle-eyed Korean rockfish and a fish with a parrot-like beak, known as the spotted knifejaw.

The facility is a next-generation showcase for the country’s ambitious plans, which call for 200 pilot projects by 2025. It’s a 5G-enabled, AI-equipped “ecological” ranch that features submarine robots for underwater patrols and “intelligent breeding cages” that collect environmental data in near-real time to optimize breeding by, for example, feeding fish automatically.

In an article published by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, China’s top science institute, one high-ranking fisheries expert sketches out plans for a seductive tech-driven future where production and conservation go hand in hand: Ecological ranches ring the coastline, seagrass meadows and coral reefs regrow around them, and autonomous robots sustainably harvest mature seafood. 

But now, Chinese researchers say, is the time to take stock of lessons learned from the rapid rollout of ranching to date. Before the country invests billions more dollars into similar projects in the coming years, it must show it can get the basics right.

What, exactly, is a marine ranch? 

Developing nations have historically faced a trade-off between plundering marine resources for development and protecting ecosystems for future generations, says Cao Ling, a professor at Xiamen University in eastern China. When growing countries take more than natural ecosystems can replenish, measures like seasonal fishing bans have been the traditional way to allow fisheries to recover. Marine ranching offers an alternative to restricting fishing—a way to “really synergize environmental, economic, and social development goals,” says Cao—by actively increasing the ocean’s bounty. 

It’s now a “hot topic” in China, says Cao, who grew up on her family’s fish farm before conducting research at the University of Michigan and Stanford. In fact, “marine ranching” has become such a buzzword that it can be hard to tell what it actually means, encompassing as it does flagship facilities like Genghai No. 1 (which merge scientific research with industrial-scale aquaculture pens, recreational fishing amenities, and offshore power) and a baffling array of structures including deep-sea floating wind farms with massive fish-farming cages and 100,000-ton “mobile marine ranches”—effectively fish-breeding aircraft carriers. There are even whole islands, like the butterfly-shaped Wuzhizhou on China’s tropical south coast, that have been designated as ranching areas. 

UPI/ALAMY LIVE NEWS

To understand what a marine ranch is, it’s easiest to come back to the practice’s roots. In the early 1970s, California, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska passed laws to allow construction of facilities aimed at repairing stocks of salmon after the rivers where they traditionally bred had been decimated by pollution and hydroelectric dams. The idea was essentially twofold: to breed fish in captivity and to introduce them into safe nurseries in the Pacific. Since 1974, when the first marine ranches in the US were built off the coast of California and Oregon, ranchers have constructed artificial habitats, usually concrete reef structures, that proponents hoped could provide nursery grounds where both valuable commercial stocks and endangered marine species could be restored.

Today, fish farming is a $200 billion industry that has had a catastrophic environmental impact, blighting coastal waters with streams of fish feces, pathogens, and parasites.

Marine ranching has rarely come close to fulfilling this potential. Eight of the 11 ranches that opened in the US in the 1970s were reportedly shuttered by 1990, their private investors having struggled to turn a profit. Meanwhile, European nations like Norway spent big on attempts to restock commercially valuable species like cod before abandoning the efforts because so few introduced fish survived in the wild. Japan, which has more ranches than any other country, made big profits with scallop ranching. But a long-term analysis of Japan’s policies estimated that all other schemes involving restocking the ocean were unprofitable. Worse, it found, releasing docile, lab-bred fish into the wild could introduce genetically damaging traits into the original population. 

Today, marine ranching is often considered a weird offshoot of conventional fish farming, in which fish of a single species are fed intensively in small, enclosed pens. This type of feedlot-style aquaculture has grown massively in the last half-century. Today it’s a $200 billion industry and has had a catastrophic environmental impact, blighting coastal waters with streams of fish feces, pathogens, and parasites. 

Yet coastal nations have not been discouraged by the mediocre results of marine ranching. Many governments, especially in East Asia, see releasing millions of young fish as a cheap way for governments to show their support for hard-hit fishing communities, whose livelihoods are vanishing as fisheries teeter on the edge of collapse. At least 20 countries continue to experiment with diverse combinations of restocking and habitat enhancement—including efforts to transplant coral, reforest mangroves, and sow seagrass meadows. 

Each year at least 26 billion juvenile fish and shellfish, from 180 species, are deliberately released into the world’s oceans—three for every person on the planet. Taken collectively, these efforts amount to a great, ongoing, and little-noticed experiment on the wild marine biome.

China’s big bet

China, with a population of 1.4 billion people, is the world’s undisputed fish superpower, home to the largest fishing fleet and more than half the planet’s fish farms. The country also overwhelms all others in fish consumption, using as much as the four next-largest consumers—the US, the European Union, Japan, and India—combined and then doubled. But decades of overfishing, compounded by runaway pollution from industry and marine aquaculture, have left its coastal fisheries depleted. 

Around many Chinese coastal cities like Yantai, there is a feeling that things “could not be worse,” says Yong Chen, a professor at Stony Brook University in New York. In the temperate northern fishing grounds of the Bohai and Yellow Seas, stocks of wild fish such as the large yellow croaker—a species that’s critically endangered—have collapsed since the 1980s. By the turn of the millennium, the Bohai, a densely inhabited gulf 100 miles east of Beijing, had lost most of its large sea bass and croaker, leaving fishing communities to “fish down” the food chain. Fishing nets came up 91% lighter than they did in the 1950s, in no small part because heavy industry and this region’s petrochemical plants had left the waters too dirty to support healthy fish populations.

As a result, over the past three decades China has instituted some of the world’s strictest seasonal fishing bans; recently it has even encouraged fishermen to find other jobs. But fish populations continue to decline, and fishing communities worry for their future. 

Marine ranching has received a big boost from the highest levels of government; it’s considered an ideal test case for President Xi Jinping’s “ecological civilization” agenda, a strategy for environmentally sustainable long-term growth. Since 2015, ranching has been enshrined in successive Five-Year Plans, the country’s top-level planning documents—and ranch construction has been backed by an initial investment of ¥11.9 billion ($1.8 billion). China is now on track to release 30 billion juvenile fish and shellfish annually by 2025. 

So far, the practice has produced an unlikely poster child: the sea cucumber. A spiky, bottom-dwelling animal that, like Japan’s scallops, doesn’t move far from release sites, it requires little effort for ranchers to recapture. Across northern China, sea cucumbers are immensely valuable. They are, in fact, one of the most expensive dishes on menus in Yantai, where they are served chopped and braised with scallions.

Some ranches have experimented with raising multiple species, including profitable fish like sea bass and shellfish like shrimp and scallops, alongside the cucumber, which thrives in the waste that other species produce. In the northern areas of China, such as the Bohai, where the top priority is helping fishing communities recover, “a very popular [mix] is sea cucumbers, abalone, and sea urchin,” says Tian Tao, chief scientific research officer of the Liaoning Center for Marine Ranching Engineering and Science Research at Dalian Ocean University. 

Designing wild ecosystems 

Today, most ranches are geared toward enhancing fishing catches and have done little to deliver on ecological promises. According to Yang Hongsheng, a leading marine scientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the mix of species that has so far been introduced has been “too simple” to produce a stable ecosystem, and ranch builders have paid “inadequate attention” to that goal. 

Marine ranch construction is typically funded by grants of around ¥20 million ($2.8 million) from China’s government, but ranches are operated by private firms. These companies earn revenue by producing seafood but have increasingly cultivated other revenue streams, like tourism and recreational fishing, which has boomed in recent years. So far, this owner-­operator model has provided few incentives to look beyond proven methods that closely resemble aquaculture—like Genghai No. 1’s enclosed deep-sea fishing cages—and has done little to encourage contributions to ocean health beyond the ranch’s footprint. “Many of the companies just want to get the money from the government,” says Zhongxin Wu, an associate professor at Dalian Ocean University who works with Tian Tao. 

Making ranches more sustainable and ecologically sound will require a rapid expansion of basic knowledge about poorly studied marine species, says Stony Brook’s Yong Chen. “For a sea cucumber, the first thing you need to know is its life history, right? How they breed, how they live, how they die,” he says. “For many key marine species, we have few ideas what temperature or conditions they prefer to breed and grow in.”

YANG GUANYU/XINHUA/ALAMY

Chinese universities are world leaders in applied sciences, from agricultural research to materials science. But fundamental questions aren’t always easy to answer in China’s “quite unique” research and development environment, says Neil Loneragan, president of the Malaysia-based Asian Fisheries Society and a professor emeritus of marine science at Murdoch University in Australia. 

The central government’s controlling influence on the development of ranching, Loneragan says, means researchers must walk a tightrope between their two bosses: the academic supervisor and the party chief. Marine biologists want to understand the basics, “but researchers would have to spin that so that it’s demonstrating economic returns to industry and, hence, the benefits to the government from investment,” he says. 

Many efforts aim to address known problems in the life cycles of captive-bred fish, such as inadequate breeding rates or the tough survival odds for young fish when they reach the ocean. Studies have shown that fish in these early life stages are particularly vulnerable to environmental fluctuations like storms and recent ocean heat waves. 

One of the most radical solutions, which Zhongxin Wu is testing, would improve their fitness before they’re released from breeding tanks into the wild. Currently, Wu says, fish are simply scooped up in oxygenated plastic bags and turned loose in ocean nurseries, but there it becomes apparent that many are weak or lacking in survival skills. In response, his team is developing a set of “wild training” tools. “The main method is swimming training,” he says. In effect, the juvenile fish are forced to swim against a current, on a sort of aquatic treadmill, to help acclimate them to the demands of the wild. Another technique, he says, involves changing the water temperature and introducing some other species to prepare them for seagrass and kelp forests they’ll meet in the world outside.

Wu says better methods of habitat enhancement have the greatest potential to increase the effectiveness of marine ranching. Today, most ranches create undersea environments using precast-con­crete structures that are installed under 20 meters of water, often with a rough surface to support the growth of coral or algae. The typical Chinese ranch aims for 30,000 cubic meters of artificial reefs; in the conservation-­focused ranching area around Wuzhizhou Island, for instance, 1,000 cast-concrete reef structures were dropped around the tropical island’s shores. Fish populations have multiplied tenfold in the last decade. 

This is by far the most expensive part of China’s ranching program. According to a national evaluation coauthored by Cao Ling, 87% of China’s first $1 billion investment has gone to construct artificial reefs, with a further 5% spent on seagrass and seaweed restoration. These costs have brought both questions about the effectiveness of the efforts and a drive for innovation. Across China, some initial signs suggest that the enhancements are making a difference: Sites with artificial reefs were found to have a richer mix of commercially important species and higher biomass than adjacent sites. But Tian and Wu are investigating new approaches, including custom 3D-printed structures for endangered fish. On trial are bungalow-­size steel ziggurats with wide openings for yellowtail kingfish—a large, predatory fish that’s prized for sashimi—and arcs of barrel-­vaulted concrete, about waist height, for sea cucumbers. In recent years, structures have been specifically designed in the shape of pyramids, to divert ocean currents into oceanic “upwellings.” Nutrients that typically settle on the seafloor are instead ejected back up toward the surface. “That attracts prey for high-level predators,” says Loneragan, including giant tuna-like species that fetch high prices at restaurants.

Has China found a workable model?

So will China soon be relying on marine ranches to restock the seas? We still don’t have anywhere near enough data to say. The Qingdao Marine Conservation Society, an environmental NGO, is one of the few independent organizations systematically assessing ranches’ track records and has, says founder Songlin Wang, “failed to find sufficient independent and science-based research results that can measurably verify most marine ranches’ expected or claimed environmental and social benefits.”

One answer to the data shortfall might be the kind of new tech on display at Genghai No. 1, where robotic patrols and subsea sensors feed immediately into a massive dashboard measuring water quality, changes in the ocean environment, and fish behavior. After decades as a fairly low-tech enterprise, ranching in China has been adopting such new technologies since the beginning of the latest Five-Year Plan in 2021. The innovations promise to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and make ranches more resilient to climate fluctuations and natural disasters, according to the Chinese Academy of Sciences. 

But Yong Chen, whose lab at Stony Brook partners with Chinese researchers, is skeptical that researchers are gathering and sharing the right data. “The problem is, yes, there’s this visualization. So what?” he says. “[Marine ranching companies] are willing to invest money into this kind of infrastructure, create that kind of big screen, and people will walk in and say ‘Wow, look at that!’” he adds. “Yeah, it’s beautiful. It definitely will impress the leadership. Important people will give you money for that. But as a scientist, my question to you is: How can it help you inform your decision-making process next year?” 

Will China soon be relying on marine ranches to restock the seas? We still don’t have anywhere near enough data to say.

“Data sharing is really difficult in China,” says Cao Ling. Most data produced by private companies remains in their servers. But Cao and Chen say that governments—local or central—could facilitate more open data sharing in the interest of guiding ranch design and policy. 

But China’s central government is convinced by what it has seen and plans to scale up investment. Tian, who leads the government committee on marine ranching, says he has recently learned that the next Ten-Year Plan will aim to increase the number of pilot ranches from 200 to 350 by 2035. Each one is expected to be backed by ¥200 million ($28 million)—10 times the typical current investment. Specific policies are due to be announced next year, but he expects that ranches will no longer be funded as standalone facilities. Instead, grants will likely be given to cities like Dalian and Yantai, which can plan across land and sea and find ways to link commercial fishing with power generation and tourism while cutting pollution from industry. 

Tian has an illustration that aims to visualize the coming tech-driven ecological ranching system, a sort of “marine ranching 3.0”: a sea cove monitored by satellites and restored to such good health that orcas have returned to its fish-filled waters. It’s a near-utopian image seemingly ripped from a 1960s issue of Popular Science. There’s even stranger research that aims to see if red sea bream like the one Jack Klumpp caught can be conditioned like Pavlov’s dogs—in this case to flock to the sound of a horn, so the ocean’s harvest would literally swim into nets at the press of a button. 

So far China’s marine ranching program remains far from any of this, despite the isolated signs of success. But ultimately what matters most is to find a “balance point” between commerce and sustainability, says Cao. Take Genghai No. 1: “It’s very pretty!” she says with a laugh. “And it costs a lot for the initial investment.” If such ranches are going to contribute to China’s coming “ecological civilization,” they’ll have to prove they are delivering real gains and not just sinking more resources into a dying ocean. 

Matthew Ponsford is a freelance reporter based in London.