The problem with farmed seafood
105 comments
·November 3, 2025piltdownman
reenorap
You can't have a sustainable ecology when China sends a city of trawlers to devastate fish stocks around the world and then sends it all back to China. It leaves the countries that were depending on that fish suffering with no repercussions for China. As far as I'm concerned, those cities of fishing boats should be sunk because it's an act of war by China.
lisbbb
I was going to post the exact same comment. The Chinese, and probably others, are not cooperating and are basically stripping the oceans clean. So it really doesn't matter what anyone else does when there are such egregiously bad actors present. Now every budding Maoist sympathizer on here can downvote me, lol.
PaulHoule
It is all a collective action problem. The gains you get now by fishing more are real, the loss you get from overshooting the limits is hypothetical and ind the future and the present always wins.
Fisheries off the coast of New England have consistently gone through the cycle of fisherman arguing with ecologists, being right in the good years, having a bad year, having a fishery collapse, a few years of recessions and then finding some other population of fish which is less desirable, further away, more expensive, etc.
MaoTinyDong
[flagged]
maxglute
PRC fishing mostly on international waters is an act of war now? NVM PRC DWF about as well behaved as other distant fishing fleet in terms of clipping EEZs and they're still underfishing per capita relative other large fishing powers, i.e. they're taking less from commons then entitled.
Countries dependent are migratory transnational resource extraction are frankly living on a retarded business model and have only themselves to blame. Reminder 80% of PRC fish comes from sustainable aquaculture that control in their soveign waters. That's your sustainable ecology model, but it requires capex / infra to manage husbandry instead relying on gaia like some hunter gather.
baxuz
That's absolute bs. There's documented videos of basically armadas fishing up to the very edge of Argentina's territorial waters.
datadrivenangel
The need for wild-caught protein to feed fish is so strong that there is krill piracy around antarctica!
https://apnews.com/article/whales-antarctica-krill-global-wa...
dv_dt
I thought there were fairly large blackfly farming operations for fish feeding. maybe for non-ocean species? As with a lot of operational farming practices- it's probably a lot more complex than a few articles could easily encompass.
pstuart
Did you mean black soldier fly? Farming them is a thing and there should be a lot more of them -- converting waste to protein is a major win.
dv_dt
Yes, that's the species I was recalling. There were some issues with occasional accidental releases, but other than that, they seemed like a nice process.
forgotoldacc
> Veramaris, a joint venture in the Netherlands and the United States, cultivated algae that produced the same omega-3 fatty acids found in fish oil, and in quantities sufficient to replace billions of forage fish.
If something like this works, it has the double benefit of pulling carbon from the air/water and turning all of the matter into food. With typical plants we grow on land, (generally) most of the plant isn't consumed so whatever carbon it stored is a waste product. In some countries, that waste is just burned and sent back into the atmosphere. But basically 100% of algae's mass is consumable.
lm28469
> But basically 100% of algae's mass is consumable.
I'm not sure it helps at all regarding co2, you'll shit it and breath it out in a matter of days... co2 is only a problem when you burn fossil fuels, because you reintroduce millions years of deposit back in the atmosphere in a very short period of time. That's why things like burning wood aren't a big deal other than localised pollution
mattlutze
By avoiding fishing, you stop damaging many of the carbon sink systems in the ocean, and so as a second-order effect improve the sinks we used to have.
forgotoldacc
There are countless carbon sinks within the ocean. It finds its way into the shells of creatures (calcium carbonate) and hangs around for a very long time in solid form. And lots of creatures die/defecate, that sinks to the bottom of the sea, and much of the carbon there doesn't rise back up since not all of it is consumed.
And when you're spreading seaweed over a fish farm, a good chunk of that is flowing back out into the ocean and contributing to the cycle of carbon deposits.
https://animatingcarbon.earth/fish-the-excretion-effect-boos...
RealityVoid
Shitting it will not release it into the air. Maybe a small percentage, depending on it's circuit in nature. But yes, your point about the CO2 circuit stands.
CGMthrowaway
Most (85-90%) of the carbon in the food we eat is breathed out, not excreted
maeln
Turns out, we were the carbon captor all along
lisbbb
We need to figure out how to make 8 billion humans act as carbon sinks!
api
Over time it would gradually remove CO2 since not all of it goes back, but stuff like this isn't even a rounding error compared to the amount of CO2 we'd need to remove.
Planting billions and billions of trees would pull a lot more, but still would only make a small dent. Greening large desert regions with large scale water and local climate engineering projects, ocean seeding, etc. would also pull more but still only make a dent.
CGMthrowaway
Tell that to the anti-cow people, they will have a cow
Faelon
Unfortunately this pithy comment is inconsistent with the science. https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local Most of the emissions from beef comes from negative land-use change, that is the loss of carbon-sequestering life that existed in the land for both the cows and the tons of agricultural food they eat, and methane, which is released directly to our atmosphere and is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. Fortunately, if we were to phase out cattle, this methane has a half-life much shorter than CO2 and would provide important early gains in restabilizing our climate.
gizmo686
If eating food sequestered carbon, then Earth would have turned into an ice ball millions (billions?) of years ago.
helicone
he's saying the plant breathes the CO2 then turns it into food, then you feed that food to the fish instead of other fish, putting the carbon back into the life cycle
and the earth probably did turn into an ice ball millions of years ago
adrian_b
Nope, it does not pull any carbon dioxide from air/water.
The oil with omega-3 acids is not produced from any algae, but from cultures of special strains of Schizochytrium.
Schizochytrium is a fungus-like organism (not related to true fungi). It is called "algae" in marketing language, because "Schizochytrium" or "Stramenopiles" are words unknown to the general population and because "algae" sounds more appealing to the rich vegans who have afforded to pay the high prices under which this oil has been sold for many years.
In any case, this does not matter much. Long-chain omega-3 are an essential fish food ingredient, but by mass they are a small fraction of fish food. Much more can be gained regarding carbon dioxide by using for the fish food a mixture of vegetable proteins that have been preprocessed to enable their digestion by fish.
Schyzochytrium has enabled the production of long-chain omega-3 acids without capturing small fish or krill for a few decades, but in the past the cost of Schyzochytrium oil was too high.
In order to be used as an ingredient in farmed fish food the cost of Schizochytrium oil had to be decreased a lot.
It appears that at least Veramaris has succeeded to do this, but unfortunately such progresses have not become visible yet in the retail price of Schizochytrium oil for human consumption.
A decade ago, Schizochytrium oil was 8 to 10 times more expensive than fish oil. Then its price has decreased, so that 4 or 5 years ago it already was only 3 times more expensive than fish oil.
Unfortunately, after that there were no further price reductions, so today the retail price of Schizochytrium oil is about the same as 5 years ago.
If the production cost of Schizochytrium oil has really diminished, as said in the parent article (because it cannot be used in fish food, unless it is cheaper than fish oil), then the producers have now increased profits, without decreasing the retail price. Of course, like always, it is not certain that this is really the winning strategy for them, because there may be many others like me, who wait for a reduction in the price of Schizochytrium oil in order to switch to it from fish oil, so keeping this inflated price may result in a much lower sales volume than with a smaller price.
Moreover, for whoever wants to consume vegan oil with long-chain omega-3 acids, there is an additional trap with Schizochytrium oil. The original Schizochytrium oil has a double concentration in comparison with fish oil (i.e. around 2 grams of omega-3 acids per 5 mL of oil), but there are many sellers who sell diluted oil at the same price like the sellers who sell non-diluted oil. Thus the true price of long-chain omega-3 acids from the sellers of diluted oil may be 10 to 20 times higher than from fish oil. Therefore when buying omega-3 capsules or bottled Schizochytrium oil one must read carefully the fine print and compute the price per gram of DHA+EPA, in order to be sure that the price is right.
anon84873628
To clarify for other readers... The point about "Schizochytrium is not algae" is that they do not photosynthesize and thus don't create sugars from CO2. Rather, this organism is a heterotroph and consumes various organic molecules from its environment. Industrial cultures are fed simple sugars and nitrogen sources, plus waste products like spent brewery yeast, cheese whey, and molasses.
iberator
Consumable by who? Just being not poisonous is not enough to be called consumable (taste, texture, price, availability, digestibility etc).
goda90
There is a certification group called Best Aquaculture Practices[0] that sets standards for hatcheries, farms, feed mills, and processing plants regarding sustainability and quality. They've got a new feed mill standard[1] but it seems like it gives feed mills a few years to come into compliance to use sustainable fishmeal and fish oil.
[0]https://bapcertification.org/Home [1]https://bapcertification.org/Downloadables/pdf/standards/BAP...
CGMthrowaway
Ah, fish - the one farmed animal we have not figured out how to feed with soybean yet. Soon, I guess.
I'm not quite sure "fish-free fed fish” is going to have the same cache as “grass-fed beef," despite the article's suggestion.
internet_points
? soy is a major ingredient in farm-fish food
willis936
This feels very close to Silicon Valley's bit about pescepescetarianism.
daveguy
Is that eating fish that fish eat or eating fish that eat other fish? And why?
willis936
The second one.
I thought it was a way to make the silly character look pretentious and pseudo intellectual, but misremembered. It appears that it was actually a way for the character to narcissistically draw attention.
muzani
I've been taking algae supplements lately. It tastes like fish food because it is fish food.
Apparently, it was a source of cheap protein during wars, but didn't provide enough nutrients and tastes like pond scum. It ended up in the supplement sector because it was easier to get approved as it over food. Soylent Green was inspired by it.
I hope it does go back into the fish food sector - it's cheap and nutritious but tastes worse than soy.
MichaelNolan
There are some exciting (or terrifying depending on your perspective) developments in the “lab grown/cultivated” space. I had a chance to have some WildType salmon the other day. The costs are still way above wild caught or farmed salmon, but if they can get the price down and improve the texture I could see these cultivated meats really taking off.
https://github.com/Michael-Nolan/Public/blob/main/Notes/2025...
why_at
I'm curious what they use to provide food for the lab grown salmon cells. They need all the same nutrients but even more precisely formulated since there isn't a digestive system.
It seems like it will have the same problem with inputs or perhaps even worse. This is one of the reasons I'm still skeptical about lab grown meat taking off.
iberator
Environmental groups such as Sea Piracy are against farming any kind of sea food and taking away krill or seaweed from oceans. Oceans are already devastated by overfishing
stronglikedan
Environmental groups such as Sea Piracy like to say what we shouldn't do, but they're usually overidealistic, and hardly ever suggest what we should do instead. Not eating seafood is just not a realistic expectation.
tokai
We are going to end up without seafood eventually anyhow. There's no good solution, global fisheries will continue their collapse as long as we lean on them.
iberator
Except they do!
Sea Shepard DOs:
- Document illegal fishing or whaling with evidence.
- Intervene to prevent illegal capture of protected species.
- Promote awareness and education about marine conservation.
- Buy local
- Boycott trawling method of catch
thinkingtoilet
Of course it is. You just don't like the expectation. What we should do is eat waaay less meat and seafood. It takes less land, water, and outside calories to product veggies and beans over meat and fish. Obviously this is not a reality for many people on the planet but it also is a reality for many people on the planet who just choose not to do it.
null
n3storm
This is the website of a shrimp farm in the interior of Spain. Some years working now. They do not taste like wild but they are ok. https://norayseafood.es/en/
NoMoreNicksLeft
Are those Macrobrachium? The freshwater river prawn? I can't find anything on the site, but I doubt they're doing the world's largest saltwater aquarium...
patall
Unless the grow multiple species, it's pacific white shrimp [1] which seems to be a salt water species. Also the pictures do not look like Marcobrachium
[1] https://www.gourmets.net/salon-gourmets/2025/exhibitors-cata...
NoMoreNicksLeft
Wonder if that means they're just using stock photos of shrimp. The other guy wasn't lying when he said "interior", it's about as far from the sea in Spain as seems possible. I thought all the non-coastal fish-farming ops were doing freshwater species.
adverbly
I recommend trying to eat more oysters and farmable shellfish.
They actually clean the water and have a positive impact on the ocean! Farming them is good!
cestith
The article reads as if nobody has considered farming anchovies, sardines, anchovetta, and other feed fish. We farm land crops for land herbivores. It seems we could feed some sea herbivores and omnivores with plants, and feed some of those to sea carnivores and omnivores.
cryoshon
For me, the considerable environmental issues aside, the problem with farmed fish is that it simply doesn't taste nearly as good as the wild-caught versions.
Take salmon for instance. In a lifetime of preparing and then eating several portions of salmon per week, I've noticed that the farmed salmon are pretty much always:
-Very pale pink color, as though the animal was unhealthy (sometimes stores even add red food dye to cover this up)
-Weak and mushy flesh, even when fresh; healthy salmon flesh is muscled and springy, it isn't naturally slimy and it holds its shape
-Weak flavor that seems to be missing a lot of the more robust flavor notes entirely
-Thinner or nearly-nonexistent layer of fat between the flesh and the scales (contributes to less flavor overall and removes a lot of the umami); the same problem also applies to the thin bands of fat between the rows of muscle in the filet itself
-Skin/scales slightly disintegrate or fleck away at a touch instead of remaining intact
I don't even bother buying it even if it's significantly cheaper.
I can't imagine that the nutrient content is the same as the wild-caught fish. And based on the sickly look and taste of the meat, it's also very hard to believe that the farmed fish live a life that they find to be pleasant, to the extent such a thing is possible.
orev
Wild-caught salmon is pink because of the krill they eat, so in a way it’s also a dye. Farmed salmon definitely has coloring added to get this effect, but otherwise the flesh itself isn’t naturally pink.
maxerickson
The color in the farmed Salmon is the same compounds as the wild:
https://www.dal.ca/news/2023/03/21/farmed-salmon-colour-heal...
The amounts differ, and the farm feed may be synthetic.
maxglute
A nice steamed white fish is pretty indistinguishable for me. But again I'm not a fresh fish enthusiast, and ultimately aquaculture makes adequate inputs for fish products like fish balls or fish pattys.
srid
> the problem with farmed fish is that it simply doesn't taste nearly as good as the wild-caught versions.
I eat wild-caught salmon every day (as part of https://srid.ca/carnivore-diet) and can totally confirm this. Farmed salmon's taste is very off-putting. I noticed this only after switching to wild salmon for a few weeks.
Aunche
Arctic char and trout tend to taste more like their wild counterparts than salmon since they're raised on smaller, less industrialized farms. Many restaurants actually prefer Ora King salmon over regular king salmon due to the consistency.
null
The problem is farming seafood in its contemporary best-practice manner which is focused on output rather than maintaining a sustainable ecology.
All other issues - be it wild-caught marine-animal ingredients being eroded as a finite input, or simply killing off all-around it due to the increased prevalence of sea lice and industrial activity - are a product of the practices, not the concept.
The problem is exacerbated in a grotesque feedback loop as well as the sea lice can transfer from farms and reduce the health and survival of wild salmon and trout in particular - leading to chemical treatments and other practices which result in everything from algae bloom to facilitating invasive species to straight-forward pollution.