Thousands of tuna, their silver bellies bloated with fat, swim frantically around in netted areas of a small bay in Kumano, Japan, stuffing themselves until they grow twice as heavy as in the wild.
Is this sushi's future? Tuna raised like chickens or cows?
As the world's love affair with raw fish depletes wild tuna populations, long-running efforts to breed the deep-sea fish from egg to adulthood may finally be bearing fruit. Though the challenges are daunting, the potential profits are huge.
By the end of this year, an Australian company says it will begin selling small amounts of southern bluefin tuna hatched in its fishery. A Japanese firm breeding the more prized Pacific bluefin tuna hopes to start sales in 2013 and ship 10,000 fish by 2015.