EcocentricOceans
One of the hottest points of debate on aquaculture is the effect that farmed fish might have on their wild cousins. Fish raised in a major aquaculture operation live in close, sometimes cramped conditions that are nothing like the open ocean. As a result, they can become victims of disease and parasites—just as for centuries human …
EcocentricWildlife
As we reported last month, one of the biggest obstacles to sustainable fish farming is that raising big, popular carnivores such as salmon and tuna requires us to fish – and overfish – far down the food chain, in the ranks of smaller species like anchovies. Those are the little critters the bigger fish like to eat — and they …
EcocentricOceans
I’ve been spending much of the last couple of weeks doing radio and other media for my aquaculture cover in TIME. Everyone wants to know the same thing: is fish farming really sustainable? “It depends” isn’t a very satisfactory answer, so I’ve been focusing on the efforts of some in the aquaculture industry to raise fish more …
EcocentricOceans
As I write in the cover story of TIME this week, we’re in the middle of a seafood transition. Once nearly all of our fish were caught wild—indeed, as Paul Greenberg has written, fish are the last wild food in a world where nearly everything else we eat comes from a farmer’s labor. But that’s changing—around half of the seafood …
EcocentricOceans
I have the cover story this week on the state of global seafood, examining the rapid growth in aquaculture—and looking at the challenges facing the fish farming industry as it begins to provide an ever larger proportion of our seafood. It’s a massive subject, as you can imagine, and I wasn’t able to go into depth on everything I …
EcocentricFood
I’ve been researching the global aquaculture industry—which included a trip to lovely Turner Falls, Massachusetts—for an upcoming magazine piece. I’ll have more on that later, but I wanted to point to the new national aquaculture policy—download a PDF here—that was released today by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric …
EcocentricInvasive Species
Chances are pretty good that the last fish you ate never saw a river or the open ocean. That’s because the U.S. imports 84% of the 5 billion lbs. of seafood we consume each year and more than half of that is raised on fish farms and other aquaculture operations. The U.S., however, has not gotten invested in the aquaculture game as …
EcocentricUncategorized
Will the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approve a genetically modified salmon for sale in supermarkets around the country? Bet on it. Members of a federal advisory group in Maryland heard testimony on Sunday and Monday from scientists, environmentalists and businesspeople on the safety of AquaAdvantage salmon, a new brand that would …
