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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: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 22 2024, @12:55AM (1 child)
I smell lots of BS and FUD. The title itself is bullshit: "Why farming fish is more unsustainable than catching them in the wild"
And if you buy 1 kilo of wild salmon, how many kilograms of wild fish did it take to produce your kilo of wild salmon? Hey fool, what the f*ck do you think wild salmon eat? Potatoes?
Farmed fish are a lot less fussy over the sorts of wild fish they eat compared to humans. So you waste less wild fish if you are fishing to produce fish feed, than if you are fishing to feed humans directly ( in some cases bycatch can be up to 20kg thrown away for every 1kg kept! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bycatch#Shrimp_trawling [wikipedia.org] )
Also fish feed is not 100% wild fish.
Feeding humans via fish farming can definitely be more sustainable than feeding humans via fishing.
It's a lot easier to feed a billion humans with farmed chicken/pigs than to trap and hunt wild pigs and chickens in jungles (or worse do the equivalent of trawling, like clearcut the jungle). And while you still damage the environment, you damage it a lot less.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday October 22 2024, @04:18AM
Exactly. BS and FUD.
As if the fish-we-plan-to-eat wouldn't eat the same number of other fish in the wild?? Actually, as you say, a whole lot more of them.
Besides, farmed-fish food (at least in the US) isn't wild-caught fish as such. It's the pelleted byproducts from human food production, mostly slaughter waste from other critters (including wildcaught fish that are processed for human consumption, so it actually uses what humans would otherwise waste).
https://www.purinamills.com/products/fish-and-aquatics-feed [purinamills.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_fish_feed#Sustainability [wikipedia.org]
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.