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Published online 25 March 2009 | Nature 458, 398-400 (2009) | doi:10.1038/458398a
News Feature
Aquaculture: Future fish
The only way to meet the increasing demand for fish is through aquaculture. Daniel Cressey explores the challenges for fish farmers and what it means for dinner plates in 2030.
Sitting in an unremarkable family restaurant a short drive from his institute in Stirling, UK, Randolph Richards scans the menu's seafood offerings with an expert eye.
"The salmon is probably farmed in Orkney," he says, referring to an archipelago north of mainland Scotland.
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It is too bad the author did not discuss a major problem in open water aquaculture: spreading disease to natural populations of fish. On the Pacific coast of the US, sport and commercial fisheries of wild/hatchery stocks dwarf aquaculture production, yet the few farms that exist are very good at infecting traveling stocks of salmon up and down the coast from Alasks to California. The only solution in this situation is to move inland. Open water aquaculture works when all resources have already been decimated, but is truly jeopardizing our native stocks that we are spending billions to rebuild. Check out the book "Bottomfeeder".
For more on tilapia and the benefits of 'vegetarian fish', see Fish farming: Eat your veg (subsctiption to Nature needed) http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v426/n6965/full/426378a.html
It is too bad that the likes of Mr. Swanson don't utter what is really on their neo-luddite minds. Sit pretty and do nothing, lets have children with hunger swollen bellies in London like in the middle of Zimbabwe. No matter that this widespread gospel like dogma, is widespread amongst the ignorant but activist busybodies. What they obfuscate, is that their poisonous recipes are unsustainable, at present population levels. Why don't you give us a good, honest Malthusian spiel ?
About 10,000 years or so ago, people began to cultivate "tame" crops instead of foraging for them in the wild, and now we eat very little that is found by foraging. Not long thereafter, we started to eat more "tame" animals than wild ones. In both cases, domestication was accompanied (usually inadvertently) by genetic modification. It has long seemed obvious that the next step would be to move from hunting fish to farming them, and that the transition would also be accompanied by genetic changes between the wild and "tame" varieties. In the cases of both crops and farmed animals, the tame varieties sometimes back-cross into the wild, and diseases of tame varieties affect the wild varieties. I see no reson to believe that the situation would be different for fish, nor to believe that fish farming would not be much better in the long run than hunting wild varieties to extinction. The need for precautions against disease and genetic transmissions from the farm to the wild is presumably much better known now than was the equivalent for crops and farmed animals thousands of years ago; appropriate regulation through the United Nations should be possible to achieve so as to sustain both the wild ecology and the human food supply.
While the future of fish may indeed be farmed, as Daniel Cressey attests in his News Feature, how this future is articulated and executed will determine whether aquaculture will reduce or add to the stress on the world?s oceans. We will need vision and sound science, not luck, to ensure that 30 million tones of fish are sustainably added to the marketplace by 2030. The fundamental paradox of many current forms of aquaculture is its reliance on wild caught forage fish for feed ingredients. As goes many of the world?s wild-caught food fish, so will go the world?s forage fish without ecosystem-based management and a dedicated commitment to move aquaculture away from these feed sources. However, looking for solutions in genetically-modified soya or genetically-engineered fish, as Cressey recommends, will only replace one concern with another. Furthermore, it is far from clear what proportion of the ocean?s ecosystem services are needed to meet the world?s growing hunger for fish. Ecological footprint analysis of aquaculture could shed some light on this important question. Moving aquaculture into offshore marine waters is no guarantee that this would ?remove many of the problems of near-shore farms?. In particular, among a range of concerns, disease amplification and retransmission will persist in the open ocean. Fundamental principles of ecology and evolutionary biology show that this is an inherent risk of open net pen farming, whether located in coastal waters or in the open ocean. In the United States, no national framework is in place to shape and regulate aquaculture in open ocean waters. Such a framework, including rigorous national environmental, socioeconomic, and liability standards, is needed before an open ocean aquaculture industry develops, not after it has expanded and caused environmental problems. One has only to look to the recent experience with rampant disease proliferation among Chilean salmon farms to appreciate the vital role of a national vision for the future of fish farming. Our oceans, and the future of a sustainable seafood supply, are too important to be left up to luck. George H. Leonard, Ph.D. Aquaculture Director Ocean Conservancy