China wants to restore the sea with high-tech marine ranches:
Developing nations have historically faced a trade-off between plundering marine resources for development and protecting ecosystems for future generations, says Cao Ling, a professor at Xiamen University in eastern China. When growing countries take more than natural ecosystems can replenish, measures like seasonal fishing bans have been the traditional way to allow fisheries to recover. Marine ranching offers an alternative to restricting fishing—a way to "really synergize environmental, economic, and social development goals," says Cao—by actively increasing the ocean's bounty.
It's now a "hot topic" in China, says Cao, who grew up on her family's fish farm before conducting research at the University of Michigan and Stanford. In fact, "marine ranching" has become such a buzzword that it can be hard to tell what it actually means, encompassing as it does flagship facilities like Genghai No. 1 (which merge scientific research with industrial-scale aquaculture pens, recreational fishing amenities, and offshore power) and a baffling array of structures including deep-sea floating wind farms with massive fish-farming cages and 100,000-ton "mobile marine ranches"—effectively fish-breeding aircraft carriers. There are even whole islands, like the butterfly-shaped Wuzhizhou on China's tropical south coast, that have been designated as ranching areas.
To understand what a marine ranch is, it's easiest to come back to the practice's roots. In the early 1970s, California, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska passed laws to allow construction of facilities aimed at repairing stocks of salmon after the rivers where they traditionally bred had been decimated by pollution and hydroelectric dams. The idea was essentially twofold: to breed fish in captivity and to introduce them into safe nurseries in the Pacific. Since 1974, when the first marine ranches in the US were built off the coast of California and Oregon, ranchers have constructed artificial habitats, usually concrete reef structures, that proponents hoped could provide nursery grounds where both valuable commercial stocks and endangered marine species could be restored.
Today, fish farming is a $200 billion industry that has had a catastrophic environmental impact, blighting coastal waters with streams of fish feces, pathogens, and parasites.
Marine ranching has rarely come close to fulfilling this potential. Eight of the 11 ranches that opened in the US in the 1970s were reportedly shuttered by 1990, their private investors having struggled to turn a profit. Meanwhile, European nations like Norway spent big on attempts to restock commercially valuable species like cod before abandoning the efforts because so few introduced fish survived in the wild. Japan, which has more ranches than any other country, made big profits with scallop ranching. But a long-term analysis of Japan's policies estimated that all other schemes involving restocking the ocean were unprofitable. Worse, it found, releasing docile, lab-bred fish into the wild could introduce genetically damaging traits into the original population.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by pdfernhout on Wednesday January 01, @03:53PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealab_2020 [wikipedia.org]
"The series took place in the year 2020 at Sealab, an underwater research base on the Challenger seamount. Commanded by Captain Michael Murphy, Sealab was home to 250 people, and was dedicated to the exploration of the seas and the protection of marine life. Dr. Paul Williams, a Chinook oceanographer, led the scientific research team. Among other things, the crew of Sealab faced such challenges as attacks from sharks and giant squids, potential environmental disasters, and threats to Sealab and marine life from shipping."
As a kid in the 1970s, I aspired to be one of the people who ran that place (one was named Paul). I was kind of sad when 2020 rolled around and I was not. On the plus side, I did marry someone who had studied Marine Biology/Ecology (among other things).
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 1, Troll) by looorg on Wednesday January 01, @04:28PM (4 children)
Is this why they keep dragging their anchors for kilometers? They are practicing their underwater plowing. Oh it was ranching not farming. Still the poor ranch fishes have to eat.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Frosty Piss on Wednesday January 01, @06:37PM
Russians, dude.
(Score: 3, Informative) by drussell on Wednesday January 01, @06:55PM (2 children)
The most recent ship involved in the Estlink 2 cable severing incident, the Eagle S is operated by a company from the UAE, under the flag of the Cook Islands, officially under management of the company Peninsular Maritime India, with an Indian safety management certificate from September 2024, whose captain is from Georgia, was working under contract for the Russians transporting a load of unleaded gasoline from Russia to Turkey.
What part of that involves the Chinese?
I guess, it was originally built in China for the Singapore,an company FR8 Holdings PTE Ltd. back in 2006... but that's about the extent of the involvement of the Chinese in that one.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Ingar on Thursday January 02, @01:15PM (1 child)
European investigators believe the chinese ship Yi Peng 3, a 225-meter vessel loaded with Russian fertilizer, dragged its anchor for over 100 miles,
cutting cables between Sweden, Lithuania, Germany and Finland on November 17-18.
Understanding is a three-edged sword: your side, their side, and the truth.
(Score: 2) by drussell on Thursday January 02, @04:04PM
That ship is indeed owned and operated by a Chinese company and had a Chinese captain. It was operating under contract for the Russians, carrying a load of fertilizer at the time of the incident. It is, however, still unknown whether the Chinese government was actually involved in any way, or whether the Russians themselves simply just directly coerced the captain somehow or whatever...
Brush With Russia in Baltic Points to New Flashpoint in NATO-Moscow Shadow War [archive.is]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by c0lo on Wednesday January 01, @05:56PM
Drop "Paolo Fanciulli" in your fav search engine
E.g. [theguardian.com]
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Wednesday January 01, @07:35PM
There's a lot of recent promising geoengineering research about oceanic carbon capture that's looking at raising alkalinity and macroalgal cultivation that would probably get a whole lot cheaper to scale if you can just tell these ranchers to drop a barrel of goo when a test strip turns the wrong color every other week.
compiling...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 01, @09:52PM (3 children)
>trade-off between plundering marine resources for development and protecting ecosystems for future generations
There's another option that gives abundant resources replenishment without ecosystem destruction: marine preserves, aka MPAs marine protected areas: https://theconversation.com/marine-protected-areas-safeguard-more-than-ecology-they-bring-economic-benefits-to-fisheries-and-tourism-225337 [theconversation.com]
and the concept doesn't only apply to marine ecosystems: https://eowilsonfoundation.org/what-is-the-half-earth-project/ [eowilsonfoundation.org]
Although, due to our air breathing surface dwelling lack of empathy and especially lack of knowledge of what goes on in marine ecosystems when they are "harvested" just staying the hell out of a marine volume is the best way to keep it producing at pre-exploitation levels, which almost always translate to dramatically increased abundance in adjacent fisheries.
Of course, government regulation is much harder for individuals to profit from as compared with investment and ownership, so a key question becomes: are we actually trying to keep healthy and productive fisheries, or just profit from activity that uses the ocean?
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 02, @01:32AM (2 children)
Farming is the lesser evil unless done badly wrong. It would be worse if humans hunted for millions of pigs in jungles and forests instead of breeding billions in farms.
Same if humans trawled oceans for seafood instead of farming seafood. Yes I know the farmed fish eat fish too BUT if you're fishing for fish food there can be much less bycatch, and the fish food doesn't have to be 100% fish.
Similarly for cities - having most of the billions of people living in cities allows other areas to be less disturbed and more amenable to wildlife. 8 billion people. 4 billion hectares of forest. Do the math and you'll realize that concentrating the damage into smaller areas allows other spots to be less damaged. Especially if you also start controlling/limiting the damage done by those smaller areas (reduction of pollution, better waste handling, etc).
The Chinese Government probably has smart knowledgeable people in power who know this - they have 1+ billion people and they know those people can't be fed sustainably by fishing and hunting in the "wilderness". Same goes for their solar, wind, nuclear, etc, rollout.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 02, @02:10AM (1 child)
The problem at the moment is: humans have been trawling the oceans, for decades. All international waters.
Fish farming is great, in theory. In practice there's a lot of additional impacts that are still being learned. A big one is: it's not commercially viable, the product costs more than competing products on the market today, so... we continue to trawl, because it's cheaper.
>The Chinese Government probably has smart knowledgeable people in power who know this
No doubt, except about the "in power" part. Yes, the smart, knowledgeable people may have the power of the government position they have been posted to (if that position wasn't given away to someone less smart or knowledgeable for... reasons), but is that position powerful enough to make the right choices for their 1+ Billion people over the wishes of their richest businessmen?
>Same goes for their solar, wind, nuclear, etc, rollout.
Didn't stop them from "rolling coal" long after the majority of the world quit denying / started agreeing with the smart, knowledgeable people that climate change is a real and important issue.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 02, @10:44AM
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/everything-think-know-coal-china-wrong/ [americanprogress.org]
https://www.vox.com/2016/3/6/11168914/china-peak-coal [vox.com]
https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/chinas-climate-transition-outlook-2024/ [energyandcleanair.org]