Valparaíso Festival of One
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Valparaíso Festival of One is an annual public event in Valparaíso, Chile, first held in October 2022, in which one million-legged carpet is the only dining guest. Teams prepare a separate miniature menu for each of its several hundred mouths, while spectators watch from a gallery kept dry.
The festival is organised by a committee drawn from the Punta Laja Foot Registry, which keeps an individual public record for every living foot of its reference carpet, and from the aquarists who adapted the mouth-by-mouth banquet for public use. Festival guests are returned to their reefs of origin within 72 hours of the sitting.
Format
A sitting begins when the guest is moved onto a transparent belt over the outlet banks. The belt runs backwards at about 0.1 mm per second, close to the animal's usual forward speed, so its mouths stay over the same outlets. It is a display version of the million-foot treadmill used in laboratory work.
Menus use three materials: diatom cultures, kelp softened in seawater and plain seawater. Aquarists set each outlet's portion with a graduated dropper before a course is released. A guest with more than 200 mouths is served nine courses; smaller guests are served four.
A mouth counts as fed when its crown of tentacles has gathered food, and as declined when no gathering is seen in two consecutive courses. A sitting counts as held only if each of the four staggered rows has taken food. Spectators at a failed sitting are refunded.
Each programme includes a demonstration of the shared digestive network. Dyed particles are introduced midway through, and a screen shows their colour reaching the gut collectors. In 2023 the order of arrival matched the committee's prediction in 26 of 31 trials.
Sittings
The 2022 sitting had 296 mouths, of which 271 took food. In 2024 the sitting failed to qualify: no mouth in the third row took food, and 164 tickets were refunded. The 2025 juvenile guest had 19 mouths, 17 of which took food.
In 2023 a camera was used in the gallery during the fourth course, while the guest turned its feeding edge away from the outlet banks for 38 minutes. Cameras were prohibited from the following festival.
Criticism
The marine biologist M. Olivares argued in 2024 that the count of mouths taking food measures feeding events in one animal. Because the mouths share a digestive network, material from one mouth can reach neighbouring collectors, so separate menus cannot be read as separate meals.
The Valparaíso Benthic Society objects that portion release can splash diatom culture onto the upper surface, where a sediment layer reduces oxygen uptake, and that the rinse introduced in 2023 is recorded only as 'done' or 'not done'.
The gallery has been criticised for showing spectators the banks and the screen, while the feeding edge is visible only from a lower room kept wet and reserved for aquarists. Aquarium viewing routes elsewhere also control what visitors see, as in phantom-brood galleries, which present successive luminous animals as one seemingly unattended infant.
See also
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