May 4, 2016 — For decades, the National Aquarium has entertained millions of visitors while also teaching them about the need to conserve aquatic resources. The Baltimore institution has rescued marine animals off the coast of Ocean City, built floating wetlands to help clean the Inner Harbor’s water and featured Chesapeake Bay creatures in its tanks and exhibits.
But the aquarium was nearly silent on the subject of seafood consumption. The dark, serpentine halls told the story of precious resources being overfished. But that story didn’t have an ending — a solution for how to stem the decline. It had no programs to guide visitors on where to buy local fish caught sustainably, or how a customer could even understand what that meant.
That’s starting to change. A year ago, the aquarium hired its first director of sustainable seafood: T. J. Tate, who built a sustainable seafood program in the Gulf of Mexico. Tate is bringing together chefs, watermen and others in the seafood industry to talk about catching, raising, buying and eating locally caught fish, crustaceans and shellfish.
It is increasingly part of the story told by aquariums everywhere, at a time when overfishing is rampant worldwide while customers often overlook local products. Even fish that customers think is sustainable comes from far away — farm-raised salmon from Norway, or wild varieties from Alaska — and those distances have ramifications for air and water quality, too. Visitors often ask what they should eat, and the aquarium wanted to find an engaging way to guide them.
“Telling the local seafood story in an integrated fashion — I mean the sustainable aquaculture supply and wild supply — is one of the most important things we can do to get people connected to oceans and the Bay,” said Eric Schwaab, who hired Tate when he was chief conservation officer at the aquarium. “There’s no better place to do that than Baltimore.”