Agricultural waste corncob was used as adsorbent to study its adsorption effect on Cu²⁺ in aquaculture wastewater. The effects of pH, water temperature and initial Cu²⁺ concentration on the removal rate of copper ions were studied by single factor experiments. Box-Behnken response surface methodology was used to optimize the design and experiment of the above three factors in order to obtain the best removal conditions. The results of single factor test showed that the three factors all had great influence on removal of Cu²⁺ by corncob, and the order of influence was initial Cu²⁺ mass concentration > temperature > pH. Response surface design analysis showed that the optimal conditions for adsorption of copper ions from wastewater were pH=7, temperature 18.8℃, initial mass concentration 0.4 mg/L. Under these conditions, the removal rate of copper ions was 86.65%, which was close to the theoretical value (88.11%). The regression model has P<0.000 1 and the P value of lack of fit is 0.583 8, which indicates that the regression equation is extremely significant and can be used to analyze the adsorption of copper ions in the cultivation wastewater by corncob.