Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Great fish need lesser fish






I would not mind at all having one of these rather beautiful images hanging on my wall.

The picture shows, floating near to the surface in an artist's conception, a group of new high tech cages intended for fish farming, initially of tuna off the coast of Hawaii, though in practice they would be tethered in the deep. Each is 162 feet wide.

As Frank Pope points out however, farmed fish need lesser fish to feed on; fish meal, herring, mackerel, anchovy and sardine and other low-value fish have been feeding our farmed animals on land since the 1950s, but these days it takes 5 kg of wild fish to produce 1 kg of farmed salmon. So “Unless substitutes to wild-sourced feeds appear, the future of oceanspheres will rely not on how well the technology works, but on careful regulation of wild stocks … other small fish”