Study Says Sea Lice From Farmed Salmon Do Hurt Wild Fish—But the Debate’s Not Over

One of the hottest points of debate on aquaculture is the effect that farmed fish might have on their wild cousins. Fish raised in a major aquaculture operation live in close, sometimes cramped conditions that are nothing like the open ocean. As a result, they can become victims of disease and parasites—just as for centuries [...]

Fish Food Chain Flounders – and Finds Its Way Back

As we reported last month, one of the biggest obstacles to sustainable fish farming is that raising big, popular carnivores  such as salmon and tuna requires us to fish – and overfish – far down the food chain, in the ranks of smaller species like anchovies. Those are the little critters the bigger fish like [...]

Why It’s a Bad Idea to Fish Out the Bottom of the Marine Food Chain

I’ve been spending much of the last couple of weeks doing radio and other media for my aquaculture cover in TIME. Everyone wants to know the same thing: is fish farming really sustainable? “It depends” isn’t a very satisfactory answer, so I’ve been focusing on the efforts of some in the aquaculture industry to raise [...]

Can the U.S. Close Its Seafood Trade Deficit?

As I write in the cover story of TIME this week, we’re in the middle of a seafood transition. Once nearly all of our fish were caught wild—indeed, as Paul Greenberg has written, fish are the last wild food in a world where nearly everything else we eat comes from a farmer’s labor. But that’s [...]

A Must-Read Book on the Future of Fish

I have the cover story this week on the state of global seafood, examining the rapid growth in aquaculture—and looking at the challenges facing the fish farming industry as it begins to provide an ever larger proportion of our seafood. It’s a massive subject, as you can imagine, and I wasn’t able to go into [...]

Why Your Fish Is Foreign

I’ve been researching the global aquaculture industry—which included a trip to lovely Turner Falls, Massachusetts—for an upcoming magazine piece. I’ll have more on that later, but I wanted to point to the new national aquaculture policy—download a PDF here—that was released today by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Department of Commerce. [...]

Washington Will at Last Regulate Fish Farms

Chances are pretty good that the last fish you ate never saw a river or the open ocean. That’s because the U.S. imports 84% of the 5 billion lbs. of seafood we consume each year and more than half of that is raised on fish farms and other aquaculture operations. The U.S., however, has not [...]

Food: Why the Debate Over GM Salmon Misses the Point

Will the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approve a genetically modified salmon for sale in supermarkets around the country? Bet on it. Members of a federal advisory group in Maryland heard testimony on Sunday and Monday from scientists, environmentalists and businesspeople on the safety of AquaAdvantage salmon, a new brand that would be the first [...]