27 July 2009

Ocean Ranching ~ Sustainable Aquatechnology?

Free-range fish such as Bluefin Tuna are being hunted to collapse in a tragi-commons of stupidity and absence of property rights and the actual application of pricing, supply & demand, and other economic laws. I've written about this before in Overfishing Bluefin and End Of The Line. This death spiral is the aquatic analogue to the terrestrial slaughter of Dodos, Passenger Pigeons, and Bison. But hope now reaches us from Australia in a WIRED story by Brandon Keim that Tuna Ranch Hormone Cocktail Could Save Bluefin about the success of Clean Seas Tuna in spawning Bluefin in captivity, a breakthrough first step towards building a closed-loop sustainably engineered Ocean Ranching ecosystem for Bluefin. Other key elements, including massive next-generation seacages, are already being commercialized, as evidenced by today's piece by Andrew Gomes in the Honolulu Advertiser that 27-acre open-ocean fish farm nears launch off Hawaii's Big Isle about Hawaii Oceanic Technology's goal of ranching Bigeye 'Ahi in their Oceanspheres... And check out this NewScientist video of Open Blue Sea Farms and MIT's mobile seacages... Perhaps Lobster wrangling and King Crab herding are next?

1 comment:

Brian Hayes said...

Point inland, Cap'n, the desperate crew moaned.

I was surprised and not surprised to learn that industrial land-based indoor fish farming might have a very big future.

"I'm a strong believer that in 20 years from now, most seafood will be grown on land. It can go to the Midwest, it can go into the inner city, it can go wherever," says Yonathan Zohar, director of the University of Maryland's Center for Marine Biotechnology