Well, farmed fish will be our mainstay in the future, like it or not. Only the wealthy will be able to taste wild species, just like with caviar and shark fin nowadays.

I think we'll see a cloned fish soon enough.

True. I am not against farmed fish but fish farming that is detrimental to the native species.

I can understand people in developing countries poaching their fish stocks but as for the Portuguese and Spanish it's just pure greed.

Sometimes it's hard to understand why Japan is being given a hard time over whale hunting while those two EU members poach the seas of the World of endangered species.

I don't have an answer about this but I do have some thoughts. Farm raised fish doesn't taste anything like wild fish. The health benefits are greatly diminished. It is also frequently loaded with antibiotics so you might as well eat chicken. Particularly be aware of any fish that comes from China. Do a google search on recent news in this regard. The acception to this is domesticly farmed shellfish - which is actually aquaculture (grown in it's natural habitat).

For those who keep pointing to overfishing as the reason for the decline in the fisheries they need to wake up and face the reality that polution is the main cause. It's the pink elephant no politician will talk about. Our overbuilding of the coast and poluted run off has led to a huge decline in the number of viable fry..... less baby fish = less adult fish.
We also pump effluent out into the middle of the ocean (example Boston)fresh water + chlorine is a deadly combination for the things that live there. If it is "clean enough that you could drink it" then we should drink it...not pump it out into salinated water and screw it all up.

I have no respect for any environmental group that doesn't have the balls to include overpopulation as the root cause of our environmental woes.

Much of the bluefin used in Asia these days is farm raised. The boat price of bluefin was down to $3/lb for a grade B fish this year... in past years it would be $15 or more with grade A's fetching as much as $30......
More at issue is the way the drag boats operate - obliterating everything in their path thus destroying the food chain. As long as we do that the Cod stocks will NOT replenish themselves. Much easier to blame over fishing (when the amount of guys still fishing commercially has decreased dramatically in the last ten years) than the root cause of HOW things are fished and our polluting.

It's a very US orientated list though. I wouldn't avoid Scottish farmed Atlantic salmon, because I understand the dynamics of the salmon fishery in Scotland, and basically the advent of salmon farming probably prevented the salmon disappearing completely in Scotland.

It would also be ridiculous to be sitting in Scotland eating Alaskan salmon (never mind it's never that good because it has to be frozen and flown in).

And their treatment of atlantic scallops is too fascile. I'll eat hand dived - I try to avoid trawled.

But for the US it's probably a good list - but there are some issues with it for applying everywhere.

A UK based organisation which certifies fisheries as sustainable can be found at http://eng.msc.org/

Frozen pacific salmon is actually quite o.k. as it freezes well. The fresh salmon season here is only about 2-3 months long so the rest of the year the only thing one can get is frozen salmon.

Do note that a lot of farmed fish, especially atlantic salmon requires a lot of feed derived from the by-catch of (over)fishing other oceans.

Farmed atlantic salmon also contains more heavy metals and mercury as well as PCBs for some reason.


Overpopulation leading to overfishing is the major factor. Many fisheries are far offshore to be affected by pollution as you cite but by overfishing.

For example, it is reported the orange roughy and patagonia toothfish (a.k.a. "Chilean sea bass") take a long time to mature (decades?) but fishing pressure is so heavy that the stock is starting to collapse.

Dredging isn't the cause. It appears that the ecological niche the cod occupied has been filled by other species (herring and mackerel), which apparently also feed on cod fry. The collapse of the cod population in the NW atlantic (Newfoundland/Grand Banks) may be so complete that no fishing at all (over the past 14 yeatrs or so) + no disturbance of the oceans may never lead to their recovery - There's no critical mass/density of cod to lead to a recovery.

Please please avoid farmed atlantic salmon. Norwegian interests first destroyed their own seas by fishfarming. Then they moved to Ireland and did the same. Now they are in western Canada and on their way to doing the same.

http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/c...9864473b00&p=1

Thanks! I'll keep this handy.

Dredging is very very damaging - it scrapes the bottom clean of everything and anything caught up in it ends up dead rather it is included in the catch or not. Watch how they pitch the by-catch overboard - stick in with a pick and throw it over. Those fish that aren't already dead generally die. Most of those fish are immature and never reach breeding age.

Another major problem in New England was the recent protection of the spiny dogfish (a type of shark traditionally sold as fish and chips) evidently they are endangered somewhere so they decided to protect them everywhere ovr the last 4 years or so. They eat anything and everything - they have done a lot to destroy fry. It was a terrible mistake to have protected them at all -their population has literally exploded. Finally the opened up a short commercial season but it isn't putting a dent in them.
I am not sure on the Macks and Herring - but it is possible.

Many deep sea fish are bred in estuaries on the coast.
And far off shore - how far? Pollution travels. In the case of Stellwagen Bank is only 25 miles east of Boston - which makes it 15 miles away from the effluent pipe that dumps fresh water and chlorine, where there is a growing dead zone.
Overpopulation by demanding more food or by pollution - same end result.