Here in America I don't think many people realize that the average tax payer subsidizes the salmon fisheries HEAVILY. I served a stint with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska one year and every night we would turn on the scanner and listen to all the Russian and Japanese fishing boats fishing the edge of our waters. They would heavily overfish many of the salmon species that return upstream to spawn and whose numbers had been augmented by U.S. tax payer monies. Many times the Coast Guard could only chase the offenders, but they still would return to snipe our fisheries. You know what the ultimate result was? We (The USFWS) would have to reduce the catch numbers on the law abiding American fishermen that pay permit and liscence fees to ensure healthy numbers and help pay the USFWS salaries. Ironic! Like others have stated, the ultimate answer is to augment shore-based fisheries and reduce the stress on wild numbers, but that is a multi-generational effort that takes time. I would concur that one of the greatest advancements in fisheries in the last decade has been the Talapia. It's a wonderful fish and meets many of the necessary criteria for cooking (color, taste, texture, etc...) but it often cannot grow to the nice "slab" or "steak" sizes many people desire.
Corralling fishery grown tuna in open ocean and letting them grow full size before brought to mkt. And letting the "wild" ones go about there natural biz left alone is a disaster? Seems backwards. Elaborate for us please.
It's being done in Australia....and it's big buck. They harvest the fish by catching them by hand so they don't bruise or inure the fish before they kill it. Big money Business!
A fitting epitaph to consumerism or the human race !! Choked to death on its own garbage Dont suppose George W even knows what we are on about DOH DOH DOH Its OK George you just concentrate on filling in the color pictures - there's a good boy. Lets hope the next President isnt such a moron ( sorry George - nice guy but.................?)
"Fish farming sounds like a good way of meeting the growing demand for seafood while taking pressure off wild fisheries. But that can be like thinking that if we ate more beef, we wouldn't need to grow so much corn. Professor Daniel Pauly, of the Fisheries center at the University of British Columbia, has described the farming of salmon and sea bass as "feedlot operations in which carnivorous fish...are fattened on a diet rich in fish meal and oil."" ..."He and his colleagues point out that although the idea makes commercial sense because of the high market price for the farmed fish as compared with the price for fish meal, these operations use up much more fish flesh than they produce, and so, far from replacing wild fisheries actually put more pressure on wild fish populations and are "largely unsustainable." The fish farming industry's demand for fish meal and fish oil provides incentives for fleets to take millions of tons of small fish that otherwise might provide much-needed protein for coastal people living in developing countries. Three or four tons of this cheap fish will be made into pellets and fed to farmed salmon in order to produce one ton of expensive salmon to sell to people in rich nations." "the salmon farming industry expends large quantities of costly and increasingly scarse fossil fuel to do several jobs that wild salmon do for free, particularly foraging at sea to catch their food" "for every kilogram of Canadian farmed salomon produced, 2.5 to 5 liters of diesel fuel or equivalent is consumed" "Another problem with farming salmon is that the waters around the sea cages and the seabed below become polluted from the concentration of fish feces and food waste that are discharged, untreated, into the sea. The WWF has calculated that Scottish salmon farms discharge the same amount of waste as 9 million people" "the Bush administration's proposal for a $5 billion fish-farming industry in U.S. waters would produce as much nitrogen discharge as untreated sewage from more than 17 million people. Antibiotics and pesticides are also given to the fish to reduce their incidence of disease and parasites, and these too float freely through the nets into the sea." All quotes from "The Way We Eat: Why our food Choices Matter" - Peter Singer, Jim Mason There is much more, but I'm not interested in continuing to type.
Much more. A lot of the feed for fish farms is corn & soybean meals, which already have been genetically modified by the corporate farmers. It is also full of pesticides and grown on dead soil. I know some of the salmon farms do not even bother with fish meal, that's the cheap salmon steak you see in the supermarket. Add all that in with the general inactivity for these fishes which in the wild are very active and you have a similar result of what beef farming produces. Diseased, unhealthy, weak & nutritionally deprived living species that we end up eating. Maybe some fish farms try to be environmentally conscious but most are far from it. Either way, the concept is flawed from the start. Top quality protein meats come from wild species not farmed ones. All of this can be shown through saturated fat content, Omega 3: Omega 6 ratios, bone strength, nutrient composition and tissue contamination. The answer is eat in proportion and have consideration for the planet that sustains us. If you have ever seen how much food is wasted & thrown away by restaurants and caterers, you would understand. Also, this problem is at least a decade old. Peak fish is way past us, the oceans were getting overfished for a long time now. Why do you think the sharks are coming closer to shores? It's not like they saw Jaws and found their idol. They are starving and can't find their prey.
Forgive the stereotyping, but the typical American palate can't stand the actual smell and flavor of natural fish -- they are better off producing some sort of manufactured "meat" using generic protein and passing it off as seafood. In the east, bony fish are the preference for the majority of the population, as is dark meat when it comes to poultry.
Speaking of fish... here is one for you. One of my investing buddies pulled me into an interesting venture a couple of years ago. He was developing fully contained waste water treatment systems with on site disposal of all effluent. (With effluent pollution levels 1/10 of the best state of the art municipal waste treatment plants!) One of the key treatment steps was the very large "settling pond" where the "stuff" settled. Fish, very many fish, were a key "engineering" ingredient of that pond! The fish were harvested for pet food on a regular cycle. It was amazing what was done with a natural ecosystem and reed beds to clean up the waste water.
Yes, at times, the "12 Monkey Army"s poject to eradicate the Human specy from earth, sounds like the right thing to do, if one cares about the survival of the planet !!
This sounds yucky but this may be the way to go. "Fish fillets grow in tank" "Scientists trying to create alternative food sources for astronauts believe we could grow meat on demand, without slaughtering fish or animals." http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2066