Sustainable Fish Farming

See video here.

Imagine you are a Bluefin Tuna and you just woke up in excitement from your bed hidden behind flakey leaves of coral because you are going to visit a place that you used to always swim when you were little with your parents and before one dreadful night when you were three and your parents had been fished and most of the fish in the seas had been overfished by a few fishermen.

You are swimming with enthusiasm, but also thinking about your parents’ death. You have arrived at your destination, and a scowl develops on your displeased face.  There are no more fish playing around, and no more turquoise water that used to reflect the golden sunlight that used to always light up your face and now there is nothing in this water but bacteria.

My name is Ella Reese and I’m here to present my problem: overfishing. For every pound of seafood that goes into the market, 10 pounds, even 100 pounds, gets thrown away as by-catch.  By-catch means unwanted marine creatures that are caught in the nets by fishing for other species. 100,000 albatrosses and sharks gets killed each year. And by 2048, seafood will be removed from every menu of restaurants worldwide.  Humans don’t realize that they are damaging the environment and taking away the lives of ocean dwelling creatures. Overfishing is a global crisis. 50% of a reef dies each day from a single small boat. 90% of large whales, 60% of small ones, are also now gone from estuaries and coastal waters.

Aside from those of us who enjoy the occasional salmon sashimi, spicy tuna rolls, salted grouper, or pan roast Chilean sea bass, why should humanity care about the extinction of these species? We are destroying a food chain system kept in balance by evolution through millennia. There will be no big fish and too many medium fish …

And then there is no one to eat the really small organisms such as plankton, algae, etc. The result? SLIME.  Shorthand for the increasingly frequent appearance of dead zone red tides and jellyfish, that, when they die out, sink to the bottom of the ocean to mix with dissolved oxygen while they rot, nothing can live in these oxygen-depleted waters except bacteria, so it’s like we are getting rid of complex, sophisticated organisms that took millions and millions of year to develop, and replacing them with the most basic one.  Not the wisest of evolutionary strategists, are we?

90% of large fish like tuna and swordfish have been removed from the oceans. 

70% of global fisheries are overexploited or have crashed. 

Only 25% of U.S. fisheries are known to be sustainable. 

3 billion people worldwide rely on fish and shellfish as an important source of protein. 

72,000 fishing jobs have been lost in the Pacific Northwest alone because of declining salmon stocks.

11 species of fish are endangered and 10 species are extinct while fishing!

Sharks are killed by finning them – a process in which the Dorsal fin is removed and the rest of the body is discarded!  The fin is used to make shark fin soup, which sells for over $200 a bowl.

What’s the solution?  Answer: Fish Farming.  Farming seafood can provide a consistent high quality year-round supply of healthy and delicious protein while reducing the need to catch ocean fish, but fish farming can have negative impacts such as pollution and feeding the fish with animal by-products.  However, an emerging company, Umami, has developed open ocean farming – a process which raises blue-fin tuna in large nets without any of the problems of on-shore fish farming.  It may be the future of sustainable fish farming.