Pacific Spirit Marine Institute
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
A company called Aqua Bounty is developing advanced-hybrid fish. ‘Average’-Hybrids just aren’t good enough anymore. The new ‘avanced-hybrids’ come in the form of salmon, trout, and talapia broodstocks.
These fish are “engineered to grow faster than traditional broodstock. The Patented fish, called AquAdvantage ™, were developed to reach market size twice as fast and convert their feed into body mass 10-30 times more efficiently than normal fish.
Aqua Bounty thinks their new ’super fish’ will decrease fish waste and use their food more efficiently. Less time in the tank automatically means less waste in the water. The faster the fish grows to market size the fewer meals it needs to eat. With luck they will also grow faster than those pesky diseases known to affect aquaculture’s farmed, pen grown fish.
These fish can be grown efficiently inland which will also mitigate the need for more expensive “consequential ocean pens.” The fish are also neutered so there is no threat of interbreeding with native populations. I wonder if each little fish gets a vasectomy or a tubal ligation. That sounds pretty labor intensive. Maybe these fish are ‘engineered’ to be sexless. Maybe engineering creates a ‘happy accident’ of non-gendered fish.
At any rate, finding faster ways to provide food for an ever expanding population will turn out to be part of our salvation or part of our destruction.
Maintaining the status quo won’t solve the increasing problem of how to feed the world’s increasing population. It isn’t clear yet what increased and unintended problems we will be creating. Only time will tell and time is running out on a hungry world.
Labels: Aqua Bounty, Salmon, aquaculture, genetically altered fish, gentically modified, trout
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
Touting the Virtues of Trout. Super fish may become the new Super Hero.
