Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 01/03/2009 12:17:16 PM PST by decimon
Fish farming has had a bad rap, but will continue to grow quickly, may be the only way to meet rising demand for seafood and isn't necessarily an environmental problem, a U.S. scientist says.
The catch from traditional fishing fisheries has remained about constant for 20 years, but production from aquaculture has risen 8.8 per cent per year since 1985, James S. Diana of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor said in an assessment published Friday.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbc.ca ...
Bad rap and other parasites ping.
Although, I don’t know that I disagree with this.
Now, if we could arrange to feed the fish locusts...
Thanks decimon. This could be a good business for Michiganders.
Put the fish on an assembly line. One can feed them, another pick lice...
More sauce, less rice.
Aquaculture works a lot better at sea than in coastal areas. It’s not particularly hard. Nets descending from anchored pontoons, with hatchery fish raised inside the nets, the water kept clean and aerated by the ocean current.
This avoids coastal pollution, and a lot of the parasite and disease problems.
Importantly, while enormous fish farms could provide huge amounts of food, the technique can also be used to restore populations depleted through overfishing. After they are a certain size, then nets are moved so that they will meet up with the natural fish of their species, then opened, hopefully to cause a “breeding frenzy”.
I say we should UNILATERALLY fertilize (lightly to prevent overgrowth of algae) the areas of the Southern Ocean that currently produce little biomass. Huge amounts of CO2 would be removed from the atmosphere while providing billions of pounds of seafood for the world’s poorest nations. In most of that ocean, the only nutrient missing is iron, so we’re talking trace amounts. Oh yeah, then we sell carbon credits to anyone dumb enough to buy them.
Is that being done?
Hmmm...it's being proposed that we seed the seaborne, I think, Antarctic ice with iron to melt it because that will counteract global warming because...something.
But feeding the fish corn (and usually the most chemically-laden corn at that) completely eliminates the omega 3 fats that make fish so healthy for us to eat. I avoid farmed fish for that reason.
If you would like to be added or dropped from the Michigan ping list, please freepmail me.
Farm raised fish is terrible for you. They feed fish corn and garbage and have made them fat, disgusting, non food like they have with everything in the stores. Fish do not eat corn folks, Talapia is a garbage fish, do not eat it.
Gracious! You all should review the [71] comments from the CBCnews.ca readers. Some very informed commentary. Most especially about the parasite problem.
Unfortunately, I ain’t equipped to say, but there are quite a few weighing in saying the regional farmed-salmon-poop problem is being unfairly blamed for the fact that Victoria, BC is still discharging untreated waste into the Straits of Juan de Fuca.
(you have to work your way through the local political lip-splittin’).
I saw video of a test site, but I don’t know if it is being done on a large scale. I gather they use a double net, the inside one to keep the fish in, and the outside one to keep out “biologicals” that would eat fish.
Other than the pontoons and the nets, there is a small boat to both move the net as needed, to store the fish food, and as a place to sleep for the divers who pull maintenance on the nets.
Something like this is needed, as the overfishing is really starting to become a problem. Countries like Japan have zero self control, even if it eventually destroys the entire Japanese fishing industry, and some countries are so vigorously poaching each others fish that it is leading to conflict on the high seas.
Thanks.
A problem for as long as I can recall. Many years ago I was something of a 'Save the Whales' type because that wasn't really about hugging whales but about a need for some international agreements regarding all harvesting of the oceans. Since then there have been some agreements and, I think, all nations with a coast have claimed fishing rights out to 200 miles.
Most farmed tilapia in the supermarkets is from China. I will not buy any. I will not buy any fish that was in contact with the Chinese tilapia. I've seen reports that the Chinese feed the fish with excrement from their chicken and pig farms.
I see two approaches to stuff like this. The left always wants to force everybody to cut back and do with less. They really have that whole suffering, deprivation and misery thing down pat.
The right, that is, everybody else who doesn’t have hang ups like the left, wants more and better and cheaper. And they almost invariably win, because they put the time, effort and energy into problem solving, instead of just whining and demanding things.
An excellent example are a small group of scuba divers who spotted a serious problem, that the “arable ocean” off the west coast had been pretty well reduced to underwater desert over many years.
So without making a fuss, they got a bunch of empty bleach bottles, chopped off their bottoms, and tied them to a string and a brick. In each one they tied a runner of giant sea kelp. They would dive down and plant some in an area, and within a few weeks, the rapidly growing giant sea kelp would make a kelp bed.
And there is nothing like a kelp bed to cause an explosion of life. The west coast is now abundantly full of all sorts of ocean critters.
The big motivation wasn’t to “save the world”, just that they wanted something to look at when scuba diving.
This is why aquaculture has such promise. Most of the ocean is pretty barren. But with a little nudge here and there, you can get an explosion of life.
Another discovery was that underwater cable with a small current flowing through it, has a magnetic-like attraction to coral, which latches on to the cable and grows at perhaps five times its normal rate. So somebody has laid a grid of cable on a section of barren coast off of Africa, and has it hooked up to a battery for the right kind of current flow. They figure than in just a few years, they will create a new coral reef out of the blue. And that is very good for critters as well. If the test is successful, they plan to try it in the Gulf of Mexico.
Fish farming of endangered fish also has a lot of potential, because it is relatively inexpensive to have drop nets, pontoons, etc. A single operation could radically increase the numbers of that species, then set them free to fend for themselves. It’s even better, because they would be well fed and healthy, unlike the typical wild members of their species.
Thanks!
I don’t know much about parasites. But salmon, for instance, is supremely healthy because it contains the Omega 3 essential oils missing in our diets that can prevent many illnesses and cancers.
However, this is only true in WILD salmon. Farmed salmon contains the same old omega 6 oils that we have in too high a proportion in our diets already, because farmed salmon are fed a diet of GRAIN.
Not to mention orange dye and lots of other crap. I’ve instructed the SO that when shopping for salmon not to buy farmed salmon.
Just passing along the ping. I love fish, but I love it the way nature makes it best of all. Especially if I’m the one spending a sunny afternoon catching it!!!
When I was a kid in the late 50s they had fish farms north of Tawas. I think they were raising carp but I am not sure. But I saw the ponds.
I guess the idea has been around for a long time.
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