BALTIMORE—Researchers say they may have overcome a roadblock in efforts to satisfy the world's growing demand for seafood through fish-farming.
While more fish are being farmed, taking pressure off wild stocks, environmentalists and fisheries experts are concerned that expanding current fish-farming methods will not be sustainable for many species because that would require more smaller fish to be caught for feed. And that can affect stocks of larger wild fish higher on the food chain.
Researchers at the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology say they have developed a plant-based diet for three popular saltwater fish — striped bass, cobia and Mediterranean sea bream. Taste-testers can't tell the difference between fish raised on the plant-based diet and those raised on fish meal, they say.
The two diets both contain fish oil, so neither was totally fish-free, but the researchers also raised fish on a vegetarian diet using wheat, corn, soy and algae meal to replace the oil. That raises the possibility of fish-free aquaculture for saltwater, carnivorous fish, said Aaron Watson, a graduate student at the institute.
"If we want to get aquaculture to expand, we need to find alternatives," Watson said.
Aquaculture for the first time this year accounted for more than half of global seafood consumption and is being looked at to keep up with increasing demand, said Tom Pickerell, senior science manager at Seafood Watch, a program at the Monterey Bay Aquarium that provides evidence-based recommendations on seafood consumption.
"It's really future planning. If we want to double or triple the amount of aquaculture production, we're going to have to look for alternative ways" to feed farmed fish, Pickerell said.
More than a quarter of all fish caught in 2008 were used for nonfood products, mainly fish meal and fish oil for farmed animals, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
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