Taking Aquaculture Offshore, Beyond the Blue Horizon
Putting fish back into the ocean?
Not such a crazy idea—and we just might save the planet at the same time.
Earth’s oceans are – to use the French idiom – pretty much screwed. From time immemorial we have treated the seas like a cesspool, and a garbage dump. We have relied upon our world’s biggest saline solution to soak up the gases and the heat that we pump into the air. We have scraped and scoured the waters, and whatever got caught up as ‘collateral’ mostly died on the deck. “Plenty more fish in the sea”, we said, as we poured more subsidies into fishing fleets.
It is, in the truest sense, a global crisis. The oceans are humanity’s true common wealth, and what happens in Shanghai or Peru, sooner or later sloshes around and washes up on the beaches of Sydney or Perth.
I began my career in fisheries management, but found the misalignment of incentives disheartening. So I felt drawn to aquaculture; to the more hopeful possibilities of giving back to the ocean, rather than just taking. I tinkered with pearl oysters for a while, but they were just trinkets and baubles: we needed to feed humanity: feed them fish that we grew ourselves.
So we adapted our pearl oyster hatchery technologies to marine fish larval culture, and looked for where we might grow out the fingerlings. In Kona, Hawaii, where we were based, the answer seemed self-evident: offshore. Any decent toss from Kona’s lava cliffs in can land a stone in offshore waters, with nothing to the West but water, until you hit Taiwan, and nothing but ocean to the South, until Antarctica.
I began my career in fisheries management, but found the misalignment of incentives disheartening. So I felt drawn to aquaculture—to the more hopeful possibilities of giving back to the ocean, rather than just taking.
Putting fish into the ocean – (though it’s perfectly OK, somehow, to pull aplenty of them out of the ocean? And it’s perfectly pastoral for bovines to belch methane and nitrous oxide?). Humanity seems to have forgotten how – once we were done wiping out buffalo, dodos and passenger pigeons - we turned to farming cows and chickens.
But quality matters. In the ocean, as on land, bad farm management bites you pretty quickly. The modern aquaculture industry is therefore now a well-spring of innovation, borne of the necessity of stewardship. Almost all -legitimate- environmental issues with earlier forms of fish farming are addressable – by sensible siting to minimize water quality and benthic impacts; improved fish nutrition; better understanding of animal health; vaccines that almost totally eliminate antibiotic use; and robust engineering and oceanographic modeling to minimize fish escapes or marine mammal entanglement.
There’s been a lot of discussion recently in Australia about inshore aquaculture, in particular salmon. Offshore aquaculture addressed many of those concerns. Still, permitting offshore, in the public domain, demands patience. In Kona, it took over three years to acquire the first permits for our offshore farm, culturing amberjack (a kingfish cousin now branded as ‘Hawaiian Kanpachi’). There was initially strident opposition from anti-aquaculture activists. But our guiding principle was to grow our fish in their natural habitat. By moving production into deeper water, further offshore, the potential ecosystem impacts could be drastically reduced. This aspiration has been borne out by sophisticated modelling, and extensive environmental monitoring around the kampachi operation in Kona, and an offshore cobia farm in Panama.
One of the five major recommendations from the recent United Nation’s High Level Panel on Global Climate Change and the Oceans was that humankind needs to transition to less impactful marine-based foods.
“So, what do you feed them?” is the perennial objection. Well … what do wild fish eat? Mostly fish, yes, but if we are going to feed the world, we cannot do that on the backs of Peruvian anchoveta. Market forces – and our industry’s intrinsic environmental ethic - have fomented a proliferation of alternative proteins and oils from agriculture and biotech. In trials in Kona, we have been able to completely eliminate all marine-sourced inputs in kampachi diets, by upscaling pet-food grade poultry meal, soy proteins (aka tofu), flax oil, and crucial omega-3 oils from microalgae. We are proving that you don’t need to feed fish to grow fish, any more than you need to feed crushed canaries to your cat.
The imperatives for growing more seafood are increasingly pressing. It’s no longer simply that more humans are more affluent, and want to eat more sushi. It’s not just our doctors telling us that it’s better for heart-health and brain health. It’s that to feed 10 billion people with beef, at the rate that Australians eat hamburger, would leave earth’s soils looking more like Mars, and our atmosphere more like Venus. Land area limitations, freshwater constraints, and – most tellingly – the global climate crisis all demand that we begin to source more of our food from the oceans.
There is now a growing body of science, and an increasing consensus – from both academia and environmental NGOs - that we must move offshore. One of the five major recommendations from the recent United Nation’s High-Level Panel on Global Climate Change and the Oceans was that mankind needs to transition to less impactful marine-based foods. We might also use macroalgae (seaweeds) to sequester carbon dioxide. We need to start to see the oceans as less a victim of the global climate crisis, and more as part of the solution.
A global analysis of the potential yield of fish, bivalves and seaweeds from offshore aquaculture projects harvests could be up to 100 times the current worldwide seafood consumption. 100 times! So the Next Big Thing – we should hope and pray – will be the expansion of aquaculture into the offshore realm. China and Norway have already deployed fish pens looking like offshore oil rigs, that can contain up to 1.5 million salmon. Net pens twice that size are now under construction.
Australia recently waded out in the right direction, through set-up of a Blue Economy Co-operative Research Center, to develop sustainable energy and aquaculture technologies for offshore, in a partnership between government, research institutions and industry. This needs to be matched by policies that support offshore growth – that streamline the permitting process, while still ensuring common-sense levels of environmental oversight. With secure tenure for offshore operations, catalyzing investments should then flow.
Australia’s ocean area – within our Exclusive Economic Zone – is around 130% of the total land area of the continent. But our wide, brown land is no longer simply girt by sea. Our future is out there – beyond the blue horizon.
Originally published in Cosmos
Researchers Successfully Replace Fishmeal, Fish Oil in Farm-Raised Carnivorous Fish
Best performing “fish-free” diet contains an algae oil rich in essential omega-3 fatty acids.
Kailua-Kona, Hawaii—Researchers in Kona, Hawaii, have made a breakthrough in the quest to develop a cost-effective “fish-free” feed for farm-raised Kampachi, or almaco jack, a carnivorous marine fish prized for its rich, buttery flavor.
The ability to replace fishmeal and fish oil currently used in carnivorous marine fish diets will have important implications for ocean sustainability and meeting the growing demand for seafood around the world.
The trial results are detailed in a technical article in the Global Aquaculture Alliance’s Advocate.
“This is the first time – to our knowledge – that fishmeal and fish oil have been totally eliminated from the diet of a marine carnivorous fish, with no deleterious consequences,” said Neil Anthony Sims, CEO of the Hawaii-based mariculture company, Ocean Era, where the trial was conducted. “Kampachi are a fast-growing, sashimi-grade fish, so this a significant breakthrough for the sustainability and scalability of marine fish farming.”
Ocean Era’s “fish-free” diet comprised of an algae oil rich in essential omega-3 fatty acids.
Aquaculture, the world’s fastest growing food sector, consumes more than 70 percent of the world’s fish oil and fishmeal, which are derived from forage fish like sardines, anchovies and menhaden. Roughly 20 percent of the global wild catch, or 18 million tons of fish each year are converted into fishmeal and fish oil for use in animal feed.
During the three-month trial funded by a Saltonstall-Kennedy grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), 480 juvenile Kampachi (Seriola rivoliana) were fed one of four diets. Two of the diets contained no fishmeal, and one of these also contained no fish oil. Fishmeal replacement relied primarily on poultry meal, from up-cycled poultry trimmings. Fish oil replacement was achieved using Veramaris® natural marine algal oil, which contains high levels of two critical omega-3 fatty acids, DHA and EPA. A fishmeal and fish oil diet was used as a control, together with an additional commercial control diet. The fish were stocked into sixteen tanks for the comparative grow-out trial.
The fish that were fed the zero fishmeal / zero fish-oil diet performed as well as the fish fed with the fishmeal and fish-oil diet. Performance was evaluated in terms of growth, feed conversion ratio (FCR), fillet yield and survival. FCR is the ratio of the amount of feed it takes to grow one kilogram of fish.
Juvenile Kampachi (Seriola rivoliana) being stocked into tanks for the F3 trial.
The fish fed the zero fishmeal / zero fish-oil diet also had a more desirable taste compared to the fish fed the commercially available control diet.
“The results clearly show that algal oil can replace fish oil 100 percent without any reduction in growth of this marine fish,” said Rick Barrows, a fish nutrition expert with Aquatic Feed Technologies and co-principal investigator of the study.
The feed formulations used in this trial are available as open source formulae through the F3 Feed Innovation Network (F3 FIN) for anyone working to replace wild-caught fish ingredients in animal feed. F3 FIN encourages sustainable innovations in fish-free aquaculture feed ingredients by sharing experimental protocols, testing facilities and ingredient providers.
Algae oils have been shown to contain twice the amount of EPA and DHA omega-3 fatty acids as fish oil, both of which are important for maintaining fish health and imparting heart and brain health benefits to humans.
“Development of diets that use these upcycled ingredients and microalgal oils is critical to the long-term scalability of marine fish culture, and therefore to our ability to sustainably feed a planet of nine billion people with heart-healthy seafood,” said Sims.
The project, titled “Developing cost-effective fishmeal-free and fish oil-minimized diets for high market value U.S. marine fish aquaculture,” was funded through NOAA’s Saltonstall-Kennedy Grant Program (NA18NMF4270208). The United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Agricultural Research Service provided feed milling support for the trial. Anthropocene Institute and Ka'upulehu fishponds were collaborating partners on the NOAA grant.
The Saltonstall-Kennedy Grant Program funds projects that address the needs of fishing communities, optimize economic benefits by building and maintaining sustainable fisheries, and increase other opportunities to keep working waterfronts viable.
A video about the study can be viewed on YouTube.
Ocean Era, LLC (formerly Kampachi Farms, LLC) is a Kona, Hawaii, based R&D company, dedicated to softening humanity’s footprint on the seas, by expanding production of the ocean’s living resources.
Media Contact:
Annie Reisewitz
annie@marcom.llc
858-228-0526