September 9, 2015 — Stocks of wild fish cannot be protected from overfishing in the long term by the expansion of aquaculture alone. Economic driving forces such as increasing global demand for fish or improved fishing methods will lead in future to increased fishery pressure on the most popular types of edible fish. Ocean researchers from Kiel and Finland come to this conclusion in a current study, which will be published online yesterday (September 8th) in the journal “Global Change Biology”.
Economists, fisheries and evolutionary biologists from Kiel University, the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, and the Finnish University of Helsinki working together in an interdisciplinary project have calculated how fishery and aquaculture will develop in the coming decades in regard to popular types of edible fish such as sea bass, salmon, cod and tuna. These four are among the most important fish species on the North American and European markets. Salmon and sea bass come mostly from fish farming, while cod and tuna stem from wild-capture fisheries.