Aquaculture

Authors: Brianna Healey, Pre-Veterinary Sciences; Will Dell’Erba, Forestry; Kurt Leavitt, Building and Construction Technology

Americans consume 4.8 billion pounds of seafood annually, and 90% of the fish consumed in the U.S. comes from China and overseas (Fish Watch, n.d.). Recently, seafood consumption has gone up steadily as fish are viewed as a healthy protein source (NOAA, n.d.). While this is good for our personal health, it is causing extreme impacts on ocean fish populations. Scientists predict that if overfishing continues at its current rate, wild populations will be down 90% by the year 2050 (One green planet, n.d.). The pressure must be taken off the ocean and freshwater fish that we love to eat, and a viable solution to this problem is aquaculture. Aquaculture is now necessary to meet the demands for seafood in the United States (Cousteau, 2014). Continue Reading →

Authors: Katie Clark, Mackenzie Radock & Matt Wah

In 2014, hundreds of dolphins, manatees, octopuses, fish and crabs were killed, beaches closed and tourism declined. That was all because of a massive red tide that occurred off of the coast of Florida. Continue Reading →

Zack Nash (BCT)

Molly Korowotny (NRC)

Rachel Grabar (Pre-Vet)

A fish farmer smiles as he looks out over his 11,000 hectare (about 42 square miles) farm near the Guadalquivir River in Spain, where a feast is taking place. Except he wasn’t watching the fish feasting on pelleted feed, it was the local population of birds devouring the stock of this natural aquaculture farm. Dan Barber, an American chef, asks: “[Why are you smiling?] [Aren’t] they feasting on your fish?”  The farmer emphatically replies: “Yes!”  The farmer goes on to describe that the farm loses 20% of their fish and fish eggs to birds (Abend, 2009). However, this is an interconnected ecosystem. The booming bird population eats the shrimp and the shrimp eat the phytoplankton. In this system, the healthier the predatory birds are, the healthier the rest of the system becomes. The farmer created an ecosystem that relies on each part to be healthy, and he extracts the excess. This means the farmer does not need any extra feed for the fish, because all of their food is produced naturally within the farm by algae and the other complimentary organisms (Barber, 2010). This technique for growing fish has not only produced large amounts of fish (1,200 tons a year to be exact), but has proven to be beneficial to the Guadalquivir River and the surrounding environment (Abend, 2009). This Spanish fish farm illustrates that aquaculture can be productive and beneficial to the environment if done correctly.  Continue Reading →

Figure 1. Example of aquaculture. Andy Danylchuk, powerpoint: Aquaculture 2012

Katelyn Buckley, Environmental Science and Hillary Whitcomb, Natural Resource Conservation

Introduction to Aquaculture

Agriculture, “possibly the greatest single milestone in man’s history” (Baker, 2013), is credited with starting human civilizations. The domestication of plants around 5-6000 years ago allowed tribes to settle down and provide a reliable source of food, often in surplus. This surplus of food jump-started a population increase, that in turn pushed for more technological advancements in the field that would further increase yields (Baker, 2013). Agriculture is a primary reason why humans have become the dominate species on the planet, and the domestication of food resources did not stop with terrestrial plants. Sometime between the years 2000-1000 B.C.  a Chinese man named S. Y. Lin was the first known person to farm raise the common carp (Cyprinus carpio) in captivity. It was in China, almost 4000 years ago, that aquaculture first appeared (Rabanal, 1988, p. 4). As with the agricultural revolution, aquaculture provides a significant source of protein that, in this day and age, can be transported and enjoyed by people around the globe. Continue Reading →