• Question: 1. What are the possibilities for lab-grown fish and could this provide a counter to our overexploitation of the oceans?

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      Asked by x.isma.xx to Anais, katy, Lauren, Richard, Stuart on 8 Mar 2016.
      • Photo: Lauren Laing

        Lauren Laing answered on 8 Mar 2016:

        This is an incredibly great question! Some scientists help to research how to improve aquaculture. Aquaculture is similar to farming, in that fish are grown under controlled conditions which are optimal or ideal to encourage growth or reproduction. This is where a lot of the salmon and trout in our supermarkets come from. Of course growing fish in this intensive way is expensive in feed costs, and the water must be kept clean and safe, costing lots of money. Therefore, some scientists are involved in projects aimed at improving this process, it could be finding a food source which make the fish grow a lot quicker, therefore they reach the targeted size to be sold on to the super markets quicker, reducing the costs in feed and water usage.

        Another example is, AquAdvantage salmon, I’m don’t think these are used in the UK, but they are approved for use in the USA. AquAdvantage salmon have had a gene related to growth hormones added to the rest of their 40,000 genes. This helps to increase the speed at which these salmon grow, reducing costs for the aquaculture farm!

        In general aquaculture aims to reduce the overexploitation of species like salmon and trout in the wild, because if we are eating fish grown on farms, we won’t be fishing the wild stocks so much. However, it is really hard to grow some species in fish farms, because some fish such as the Cod are extremely large sometimes reaching 2 meters in length! Species such as the cod are really difficult to keep in a fish farm, because they would need huge amounts of water, and take many years to grow to their full mature size!

        Another thing to consider is fish which have been grown in labs, or fish farms cannot be released back into the wild! These things are very tightly regulated by the government. This means, although fish farms help to stop us from taking too many more of those species from the ocean or rivers, they do not repair the damage already done, this take many years of allowing populations to reproduce and grow! There are also many other issues regarding aquaculture, this is an interesting thing to research and a great question!!

      • Photo: Anais Kahve

        Anais Kahve answered on 9 Mar 2016:

        This is an interesting question because there is a lot of evidence to show that we don’t actually need lab-grown fish to feed us. This is because the reason why we seem to be overexploiting the seas of fish is that the world keeps eating the same types of fish and nothing else. For example, people in the UK mainly eat cod, haddock, tuna, salmon, and prawns. If society changed its attitudes towards food then we would eat a much larger range of fish and the seas wouldn’t be overexploited.

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