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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
It has been claimed that fish farming is a sustainable source of food that will help us feed the growing global human population while protecting wild fish populations – but this isn’t true.
“Fish farming is not a substitute for catching wild fish out of the ocean,” says Matthew Hayek at New York University. “In fact, it relies on catching wild fish out of the ocean.”
Hayek and his colleagues have shown that the amount of wild fish killed in order to feed farmed fish is between 27 and 307 per cent higher than previous estimates.
Farmed carnivorous fish eat multiple times more weight in wild fish caught from the ocean than is obtained by farming them, says Hayek. For instance, producing a kilogram of salmon may require 4 or 5 kilograms of wild fish.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday October 21 2024, @03:00PM
>how many wild fish would a 1kg salmon caught in the wild have eaten to grow to that 1kg weight?
Good point. Counterpoint:
Wild salmon are eating wild fish from natural food webs that evolved over billions of years to the amazingly bountiful and productive marine ecosystems we had, yes had, up until factory fishing fleets overharvested them into crisis level population collapses.
In most cases. keeping the fishing fleets docked allows those food webs to bounce back, but not always. In any event: the fish that wild salmon eat are a (mostly) sustainable source, as long as we are harvesting a sustainable amount of salmon from the wild, the system will carry on, providing the incredible volume of available high quality protein that it has for millions of years.
The fish fed to fish farms are somewhat different, they are the readily caught fish by our fishing fleets, whereas much of a salmon's diet is not. Instead of using that catch to feed people, fish farming distills it down to higher profit species for sale in global markets. I contend that while these species are more saleable, their farmed versions are lower quality than wild caught, raised in much dirtier water with a lower quality diet. In any event, those fish caught to feed the farms could, instead, be providing 5x or more food value to locals who would gladly consume them, without having to ship anything around the globe.
Counterpoint: Jane, you're an ignorant slut.
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