April 5, 2023 — For thousands of years, humans have used aquaculture to raise aquatic animals and plants—and now, research has shown that the practice can help increase the worldwide food supply with low greenhouse gas emissions.
Oral histories date aquaculture to 4000 B.C., according to a lesson from North Carolina State University’s Sea Grant program. The first known written record of aquaculture dates back to the fifth century B.C., with the practice likely originating in China.
The practice has existed in what is today the United States for thousands of years, Peter Kareiva, president and CEO of the Aquarium of Pacific, noted.
“Native Americans had clam gardens, where they terraced the coast, and native Hawaiians had special fish ponds,” he said. “It’s an old technology, but more recently with modernization, it’s the fastest growing food sector in the world.”
Modern fisheries raise various species in large enclosures in bodies of water, Kareiva said. Other operations farm algae and shellfish—mostly clams, mussels and oysters, which require less equipment and work because they remain stationary and do not require feeding by the farmers.
For decades there has been a stigma associated with seafood farming, Kareiva said, including diseased fish escaping and infecting wild fish as well as concerns about efficiency.
“Often they were being fed fishmeal,” Kareiva said. “So you’re catching fish to feed fish, and the amount you had to feed them to get new fish meat was not that efficient.”
Advances in the industry, however, have made aquaculture much more sustainable and efficient, Kareiva said, which is important because in the fight against climate change, it should play a major role due to its resistance to unusual weather phenomena on land and the massive amounts of emissions generated by land-based food production. But a lack of public eduction continues to shroud seafarming in outdated misconceptions.