Aquaculture – Fishermens News

Restorative Aquaculture for Hawaiian Kūmū

Oceanic Institute is developing technology to raise a Hawaiian goatfish species in captivity to try to help declining wild populations. With their beard-like protrusions, typically reddish body and small white patch above the base of their tail, kūmū (Hawaiian whitesaddle goatfish) are easy to spot in the wild. That is, if you can find them. Once abundant among Hawai'i reefs, the kūmū population has been on a steady decline in the main Hawaiian Islands for decades. “The general consensus is that the population has been overfished and is currently experiencing overfishing,” said Spencer Davis, a researcher at Hawai'i Pacific University’s Oceanic Institute. Davis and his team are hoping to help the struggling, culturally important species with restorative aquaculture. In a NOAA Fisher...

Marine Aquaculture: Is it the Future of Seafood

While the concept of marine aquaculture – the nurturing and harvesting of aquatic plants and animals – has been around for decades in the U.S., the practice has been gaining more traction in recent years. Factors such as climate change and the growing consumer demand for seafood have been driving the conversation about whether aquaculture could be a viable alternative to the wild-caught seafood industry. Interest for seafood has been growing, especially among those with resources and consumers who are health and environmentally conscious. “As people become more affluent around the world, there’s more capacity to pay for that seafood, and what I’ve seen recently is a large (segment) of the environmental community … have come to recognize this as well,” said Neil Anthony Sims, a marine ...

Aquaculture – Possible Big Moves in 2022

Over the last four decades in the U.S., interest in farmed seafood, aka aquaculture—at least at the federal level —has rolled in and out like the tide. However, interest alone has yet to result in the kind of projects that deliver large scale, national impacts. In the last two years alone, numerous aquaculture initiatives had high-level federal attention, including: October 2020, in response to a Presidential Executive Order, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a request for information on the development of Aquaculture Opportunity Areas (AOAs), with an initial focus on sites in the Pacific Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. In August 2021, NOAA and the Department of Agriculture moved to update the National Aquaculture Development Plan. There should be more to co...