AQUACULTURE: THE ENTIRELY SYNTHETIC ECOSYSTEM

People need to eat, and the Earth’s native ecosystems can’t feed them all.  In densely populated developed nations, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle disappeared, with very few exceptions, a long time ago. 

In the ocean, wild-caught fisheries have hung on much longer.  One source estimated that, in 2015, about 81 million metric tons, or more than 178 billion pounds, of fish were caught in wild-capture marine fisheries; the same source speculated that unreported catch and discards could increase the real total of annual removals to something closer to 130 million metric tons, or 286 billion pounds.

While the human population continues to increase, the ocean is probably close to, and has possibly already exceeded, its maximum long-term yield.

It is thus inevitable that aquaculture, which already contributes nearly half of all seafood, will become a bigger source of marine protein in the future.  Inshore aquaculture of everything from kelp to large finfish such as salmon is already being practiced across the world, although the United States is lagging many other coastal nations.  While inshore aquaculture certainly produces large quantities of food, it also produces its share of problems.  Pollution from fish waste and uneaten food, antibiotics and pesticides introduced into the marine environment, disease and parasites that spread from farmed fish to wild populations, and escaped non-native fish, that have the potential to become invasive and harm marine ecosystems, are only some of the issues that have arisen over the years.

Partly to avoid such issues, and partly to exploit the expanses of the continental shelf where aquaculture might be practiced, there is a growing effort to move some aquaculture operations offshore, where its proponents hope that open, current-swept waters will eliminate pollution and other issues that arise when fish are farmed in shallow, protected bays and estuaries.

Listening to the aquaculture advocates, it’s not difficult to imagine offshore fish farms leading to the same sort of revolution in seafood production that intensive agriculture and animal husbandry wrought in the 19^th century United States, a revolution that not only allowed the nation’s farmers and ranchers to feed the U.S. population, but to export foodstuffs to markets all over the world.

Of course, such intensive agriculture had a downside.  There’s not left of the inland ecosystems that existed when the first European settlers landed on the shores of what is now the United States. 

The vast, flowered prairie of the Great Plains, with its attendant plants, insects, upland birds, and mammals, was transformed into a patchwork of farms, feedlots, and ranches.  Wetlands were drained to increase production.  Streams and small rivers that once ran clear, and provided riparian habitat for a host of creatures, had their banks cleared to facilitate even more planting, or to allow livestock to more easily access the water.  Today, too many such streambanks are trampled and eroded, and too many such streams run dank and hypoxic, their waters tainted by the manure, excess fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides that are an inescapable byproduct of industrial agriculture.

It's impossible not to wonder whether intensive aquaculture will have a similar impact on our coastal sea.

Last week, those of us who attended the Saltwater Recreational Fishing Summit, sponsored by that National Marine Fisheries Service and Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Service, got just a glimpse of what aquaculture might mean for coastal ecosystems; that vision was either troubling or reassuring, depending on one’s outlook with respect to increased angling opportunity, and the value of such increased opportunity compared to the value of naturally functioning marine ecosystems.

Mr. Neil Sims, the Chief Executive Officer of the aquaculture company Ocean Era, provided Summit attendees with a very positive vision of what aquaculture could mean to anglers.  Ocean Era operates Kona Bluewater Farms LLC, a company which raises “Kona Kampachi,” kampachi being a Pacific amberjack, off the coast of Hawaii.

Mr. Sims explained how his kampachi differed from the native fish.  While wild kampachi were, he said, an undesirable food fish because they hosted large quantities of parasites, and could sicken anyone who ate them with ciguatera poisoning, farmed kampachi can be raised to be both parasite- and ciguatera-free.  Thus, the farms offered a new source of quality protein.

Mr. Sims went on to explain that because of the restrictions currently placed on offshore aquaculture in the United States, Ocean Era felt compelled to establish its next project off Mexico, as it

“want[ed] to push the envelope for offshore aquaculture,”

something that it might not be able to do under current U.S. rules.

Nevertheless, Ocean Era is also working on the Vellella Epsilon Project, 40 miles off Sarasota, Florida, which will consist of a pen holding 20,000 Almaco jack.  Mr. Sims said that Ocean Era wants to be able to take anglers and journalists out to that project, where they can see the benefits of offshore aquaculture for themselves.

And what are such benefits?

For one thing, the net pens used to hold the farmed fish become FADs—fish attracting devices—which will provide increased angling opportunity.  Mr. Sims described an experimental farm off Hawaii that attracted many different types of fish, from dolphin and wahoo to tuna and marlin, and was necessarily sited close to a harbor, making it a convenient spot that allowed even small boat anglers a chance to find and catch large pelagic species.

He also noted that the fish pens could be used for “enhancement” and “recruitment supplementation,” another way of saying that fish farms could be used as hatcheries to produce more fish for anglers to catch.  According to Mr. Sims, aquaculturists have already figured out how to artificially rear species of snapper, grouper, and trevally (another type of jack).

And the downsides?

Mr. Sims didn’t dwell on any particular problem.  He admitted that there were risks posed by offshore aquaculture, but explained that such risks, could be “modeled, managed, and monitored,” although, apparently, not eliminated.  He said that offshore aquaculture didn’t create serious water quality issues or damage the substrate (bottom).  While he admitted that escapes were inevitable, he also said that the escaped, aquacultured fish were “slow and stupid” compared to their wild counterparts, and so extremely vulnerable to predators.  He also dismissed the risk of escaped, farmed fish causing any damage to wild stocks, saying that any such damage would not occur unless there were “heavy genetic modification” to the escaped animals.

Mr. Sims painted a rosy picture.

A second speaker, Capt. McGrew Rice, of Hooked on Kona Fishing Charters, admitted that the fish farms served as FADs.  He focused his comments on the Ocean Era’s temporary kampachi pen, located just four miles offshore, which he called “the ultimate FAD.”  But then he noted that

“The difference in Hawaii is that we have natural FADs, ledges and structure,”

and stated that he believes the fish pen interfered with the movement of bait onto natural structure, saying that there was less bait on the natural structure when the pen was in place, but that the bait returned to natural structure once the pen was removed.  Capt. Rice observed,

“The buoys and the aquaculture do impact the ledges,”

but they don’t prevent people from catching all of the fish that they want, due to their function as FADs.  He admitted that he’d rather not have the fish farms or other FADs interfering with the natural movements of bait and with the natural structure, but that he views fish farms in the same way that he views oil rigs.

“When migrating fish hit this fish farm, they stop there and don’t go into the places they would on a regular basis.”

Capt. Rice finished up by noting that we should be very careful about where we decide to put steel in the water, and said that using areas of the ocean for things such as fish farms can be seen as a privatization” of the sea.

So, in the end, just how should we look at offshore aquaculture?

In 2011, Anders Halverson wrote a book titled An Entirely Synthetic Fish, which chronicled the history of the hatchery-spawned rainbow trout, which has now been stocked in the waters of every continent on Earth, with the exception of Antarctica.  

Should offshore aquaculture be seen as an unqualified boon, which will feed untold numbers of people without the need to deplete marine fish stocks, while at the same time providing new and exciting opportunities for recreational saltwater fishermen?

Or should it be seen as creating entirely synthetic coastal ecosystems, where the natural movements of baitfish are interrupted by aquaculture facilities, which act as fish attracting devices that benefit anglers at the same time that they diminish the importance of natural features of the ocean bottom.

While aquaculture advocates might hold out the promise of vast ocean hatcheries, that use aquacultured fish to supplement, and perhaps even replace, the naturally reproduced fish that have long served as the foundation of coastal fisheries, is such promise truly credible?  

Will aquacultured fish become the marine equivalent of stocked trout and salmon?  Or will such fish, which Mr. Sims admitted are “stupid and slow,” serve as easy pickings for seals, dolphin, and other ocean predators, and be swiftly removed from the sea?  

To the extent that any such fish survive long enough to be caught by recreational fishermen, will such “stupid and slow” fish from the floating net pens be a challenging quarry for anglers, or will they turn recreational saltwater fishing into something similar to the freshwater game, where anglers chase the hatchery truck in search of an easy harvest?

Those are questions that the recreational fishing community needs to answer.

For there is little doubt that aquaculture in the United States is merely a fledgling business; by the time that it matures, there will be far more and larger offshore aquaculture facilities than we have today. 

How those facilities are regulated will decide whether the fish that they produce will ease current stresses on marine ecosystems, allowing them to thrive, or whether the aquaculture facilities create entirely synthetic ecosystems, which will only vaguely resemble those created by a natural and naturally evolving sea.