Researchers at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science’s Institute for Marine and Environmental Technology have developed a completely vegetarian diet that will sustain marine fish raised in aquaculture. The research, published as “Taurine Supplementation of Plant Derived Protein and n-3 Fatty Acids are Critical for Optimal Growth and Development of Cobia, Rachycentron canadum” by Aaron M. Watson, Frederic T. Barrows, and Allen R. Place will appear in the September 2013 issue of Lipids (Volume 48, Issue 9, pp 899-913), an academic journal that addresses lipid research, including chemistry, biochemistry, clinical nutrition, and metabolism.

What makes this research interesting within the context of aquaculture is that the driving question of finding a sustainable, energy efficient, food source for large carnivorous marine species has been central to making aquaculture a sustainable industry as the world’s need for protein increases. As Dr. Watson, the articles’ lead author explains, “”Aquaculture cannot sustainably grow and expand to meet growing global population and protein demand without developing and evaluating alternative ingredients to reduce fishmeal and fish oil use,”

Close to 50% of the world’s fish and shellfish supply is now produced by aquaculture, or “fish farming,” but many aquaculture methods are far from sustainable practices. Many high-value fish–cobia standing as exemplary–are high-level predators that rely on eating other prey fish for survival and growth. Aquaculture has primarily fed predator fish, like cobia, mixes of fish meal and fish oil, much of which is produced from wild-caught fish. Doing so is expensive and unsustainable. Most research confirms that it requires about 5 pounds of wild fish to produce 1 pound of farm-raised fish, further depleting the world’s fisheries.

This problem has been prevalent in aquaculture for decades. The UM research alleviates a substantial part of this problem. Likewise, part of the research identifies that cobia raised on this new vegetarian diet produce cleaner, healthier meat since their flesh is not contaminated by mercury and PCBs found in wild fish whose diets are strictly other fish and marine life.

FISH ON!

 

 

Aquaculture, Cobia, fish, Fishing

By Sid

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