Farming Atlantic Salmon in Tasmania. Photo by Arthur Chapman, Flickr.
The growing appetite for expensive farmed salmon can leave coastal communities struggling to access affordable local fish like sardines and anchovies, new research published in Science Advances shows.
The paper, co-authored by researchers with Oceana and the Sea Around Us initiative at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, exposes the global aquaculture sector’s growing dependence on wild, small pelagic fishes which are frequently caught, processed, and ‘reduced’ to fishmeal and fish oil. Almost the entirety of the production of fishmeal and fish oil, that is, 87 per cent and 74 per cent respectively, is used to feed farmed fish.
