Saving Seafood

Aquaculture can feed the world, new report claims

August 31, 2017 — A new study by University of California, Santa Barbara marine scientists led by Professor Rebecca Gentry, along with researchers from the Nature Conservancy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), shows considerable potential for aquaculture to develop around the globe.

Fish farming is now the fastest-growing food sector in the world, and is frequently cited as having the potential to address future global food security issues. In their study, the researchers estimated that 15 billion metric tons (MT) of finfish could be grown globally per year, which is 100 times more than current world seafood consumption.

The results of their study, “Mapping the global potential for marine aquaculture,” published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution on 14 August, demonstrates the oceans’ vast potential to support aquaculture, director of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and report co-author Peter Kareiva said.

“We need to find more protein for our growing population, and we have pretty much tapped out wild fish as protein sources,” he said. “This study shows that farming fish in the ocean could play a huge role in feeding people without degrading our ocean or overfishing wild species.”

Both fish and bivalve aquaculture have potential for expansion in what the researchers termed “hot spots” – particularly in warm, tropical regions.

Indonesia, for example, was found to have one of the highest production potentials for fish and bivalves. Developing just one percent of Indonesia’s suitable ocean area could produce more than 24 million MT of fish per year. If this was used entirely for domestic consumption, it would increase seafood consumption per capita six-fold.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

How Ocean Aquaculture Could Feed the Entire World – and Save Wild Fish

Marine researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, mapped out the potential of the open ocean to support farmed fish and came to some surprising conclusions.

August 21, 2017 — About five out of every six fisheries worldwide has reached or passed the limit of what it can sustainably produce, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Drought, dams, agricultural runoff and other pressures have depleted wild salmon populations in the Eastern Pacific, while on the east coast of North America, wild Atlantic salmon exists mainly in the memories of the Greatest Generation. Bluefin tuna, the preferred delicacy of the world’s finest sushi chefs, is at 2.7 percent of its historical population – about the same as the Bengal tiger.

Meanwhile, seafood farmed in coastal regions has been infected with sea lice, pollutes neighboring ecosystems with waste, sometimes produces fewer nutrients than are fed into the system, often destroys carbon-sequestering mangroves and can require large amounts of antibiotics to stave off disease.

But according to a new study from the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, aquaculture could feed a global population expected to grow to nearly 10 billion by 2050. Lead author Rebecca Gentry, a newly minted PhD in marine ecology, and her colleagues wrote that the open ocean “is largely untapped as a farming resource,” representing “an immense opportunity for food production.” In the study published August 14 in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, they found that the entire world’s current output of wild-caught seafood could be farmed in areas that in total would comprise just 0.015 percent of the ocean’s surface area, if grouped together in a way that the authors note would not be realistic or recommended. That’s the equivalent to the size of Lake Michigan.

“People assume the oceans are big but no one had quantified it,” Gentry said. “There’s not that much broad-scale ecological research on marine aquaculture, so we needed a base of information to get an idea of where we can do it.”

Read the full story at Aquaculture Magazine