Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Farm Raised Tuna

BY ALEC DAVITT

With Atlantic Bluefin Tuna stocks headed towards collapse and conservation efforts having troubles getting started; farming the fish may be one of the last chances for recovery. Farming the fish is a difficult process and involves netting the enormous fish into very large pens. This technique has worked in the past by allowing fisherman to catch small fish and raising them to a more desirable size, but until now has failed to allow the fish to breed. Recently a group of German scientists have discovered that because the fish is used to traveling great distances and a cage, even a large one, fails to produce this kind of natural environment required for breeding.
Their solution is to spear the fish with a hormone known as gonadotroptin, which has resulted in successful breeding programs. This new discovery raises the question can farm-raised tuna satisfy the worlds demand for the fish? Perhaps more importantly can these farm-raised fish be released into the wild and help fix collapsed stocks? Scientist and Environmentalists have their doubts. The biggest problem is the high amount of antibiotics used to keep cages free of disease. Most of these antibiotics pass through the fish and are secreted into waters nearby the pens and are then consumed by offer species, often with negative health effects. The second issue is the large amount of food needed to raise farmed fish on a commercial level. The fish food is usually taken from the surrounding ecosystem, robbing it of resources intended for wild populations. Still even with these negatives affects farm-raised tuna, along with proper conservation, may be one of the last hopes for the species.

Sources 1: http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-resources/stories/farm-raised-bluefin-tuna-spawn-controversy
Source 2: http://www.grinningplanet.com/2004/02-26/farmed-salmon-pollution-gmo-eco.htm

11 comments:

  1. This is a quite a catch-22, trying to balance keeping a species alive and repopulate at the cost of harming other species and even our own. The antibiotics and hormones used in the fish may also have negative impacts on the human population in the long run as well. I've heard that the use of antibiotics in poultry has largely led to humans raised tolerance levels to some antibiotics which may lead to some medications being less effective in our own bodies.

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  2. The concern for our oceans fish stocks is on the rise. As populations of favorable fish are in decline, people are looking for ways to supplement the overwhelming demand for fish on a global scale. Fish farms can do just this on a small scale, but to be profitable, the farms try to maximize production, sometimes at the cost of health of farmed organisms or the environment. While farms may be a good idea for small/sustainable populations, mega-farms are not the answer. We need to decrease demand for meat in general.

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  3. While fish farms can successfully create a sustainable market for some species, blue fin tuna are a species that would be very difficult and expensive to farm raise. This idea of using hormones does not seem very healthy for the fish or a good solution. Not only these but fish farms are also not good for the local ocean environment and are not always an environmental solution. That said i do not believe this will solve any problems related to blue fin tuna. I agree with Sammy, we need to decrease the demand for their meat.

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  4. The demand for almost every type of food is in strained demand as our population levels increase at a much more rapid rate than the earth can sustain. From The Yangtze River Pollution concerned presentation we can realize that not only our mouths and stomaches are culprit to this declining stock. The marine wildlife are dying, suffering and mutating from human activity runoff into our water sources. It is very difficult to put an idea or single policy forward to help this sort of issue. Perhaps, complete protection of wild fish populations until they reach sport fishing levels, while farming the fish in tanks or netted areas, the drug runoff is another can of worms altogether that needs years of research. Another would be perhaps population control of sort. Government initiative to reward families who have less children or wait until a certain older age before procreating at all, (giving less time for mass child producing because of biological time scales and recognition of how much children cost families individuals the government and the environment). This would lower our consumption rate or at least slow the annual pop growth rate which affects our consumption growth. . . perhaps giving us more time for solutions

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  5. While I don't think that the hormones and antibiotics are a good solution I think that farming may be important for preserving the species but should not be combined with commercial production of the fish. I think that this is where the conflict of interests arises and the wellbeing of the fish loses out to commercial production and aspirations.

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  6. At this point, I don't believe blue tuna can be saved in the wild. Their value is too high, and it would require a lot of resources to protect them in the open ocean. Science should begin to keep large numbers of them in captivity in order to maintain healthy genetic diversity. At some point in the future, the absence of fish will ultimately kill the market. Prevailing preferences might also kill the farm-raised market, which relies on antibiotics to promote commercial production.

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  7. Dang Brad... I really agree with that.

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  8. I feel as though farm raising these fish is a far better idea than harvesting them from the sea. While it would be expensive, people that had developed a taste for them would be willing to pay the price, if they desired the product enough. I feel as though sea fishing for these fish, should almost be banned so that their species may recover. I really think that the fish farms would be a good idea and prevent overfishing.

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  9. This is a prime example that human populations have overshot the earth's carrying capacity. The moment humans began to artificually inflate the number of individuals in a given species for human consumption was the moment that human health became second to sustaining population growth. This is a difficult situation with no easy answer.

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  10. Farm raised Tuna certainly has to be considered as an option, given the dwindling populations. But fish farming is just such an incredibly inefficient process. It typically takes at least two wild fish in order to feed and raise on farmed fish. It is a very difficult situation. Of course we want to lesses the pressure on the natural populations, but the chemical issues and inefficiency of farmed fisheries is not ideal either.

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  11. i firmly believe that eating farm raised tuna is an bad choice, and no better than eating regular tuna that is overfished. We've seen what grain-based diets do to the rumens of cattle, I can imagine that the effect is similar for fish, who are not biologically constructed to digest the grain based diet they are fed on the farm. Since this is such a recent development in agriculture, health effects for humans are unknown but I don't think there could be any way eating farm raised fish could be BENEFICIARY.

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