Why farming fish is more unsustainable than catching them in the wild | Producing a kilogram of farmed salmon may require 4 or 5 kilograms of wild fish, which isn’t a sustainable approach to feeding the world’s growing population.

6 comments

1. Until you realize, we “need” a market for wild-caught undesireable fish because otherwise the trawlers wouldn’t know what to do with the millions of tons of bycatch they have to deal with.

   I guarantee the math would work differently if trawlers were out of the picture. It’s similar to corn subsidies in the US, where they had to figure out how to make its way into our food (corn syrup) and cars (corn ethanol).

2. We need to eat lower down the trophic level if we want to eat fish, instead of just eating Tuna, Salmon, Mahi, Swordfish, etc. we should be eating the sardines, herring, etc. . . The smaller more abundant fish, and if we do want to pursue farming it should be with those.

3. Surely wild salmon also eat 4 -5kg of wild fish. I’m pretty sure they don’t grow out of thin air.

4. If you’re interested in protecting the environment and want to do all you can to protect it, you wouldn’t eat fish at all.

5. Lets just not eat fish. They dont taste good, cooking them fucking stinks. Its an easy thing to get away from unless you live a tribal life on the coast of africa or asia

6. we should capture carbon with algal blooms in 700km^2 whirlpools in the ocean, introduce zooplankton to the gyres to eat the algae, release small fish to eat the zooplankton and then feed the small fish to the big fish to restore ocean abundance and reverse climate change. we should also model this with agent-based simulations on gpus before, during, and after we do it