Factory-Raised Fish "We don’t take what Mother Nature throws at us. This is a factory for fish." --Bill Evans, vice president of Mariculture Systems Inc., a salmon producer (as quoted in The New York Times, March 1, 1997) Aquaculture (fish farming in a controlled environment) has become a multimillion-dollar industry. Almost half of the salmon, 40 percent of the mollusks, and 65 percent of the freshwater fish consumed today spend most of their lives in captivity. The National Fisheries Institute calls aquaculture "one of the world’s fastest-growing food production sectors." Far removed from nature, fish raised on aquafarms are penned in tanks inside steel buildings. High-tech, high-volume systems control food, light, and growth stimulation. Drugs, hormones, and genetic engineering are used to accelerate growth and change reproductive behaviors. To be profitable, aquafarms must raise large numbers of fish in intensive confinement. This overcrowding causes injuries to the snout and fins of fish and puts abnormal stress on the animals, leading to outbreaks of disease. So aquafarmers pump the fish full of antibiotics and chemicals in order to control parasites, skin and gill infections, and other diseases common in farmed fish. One chemical used to kill sea lice, Dichlorvos, is highly toxic to all forms of marine life and sometimes causes seizures in salmon. Aquaculture frustrates fish’s natural habits and instincts. In the wild, salmons’ migration from fresh water to salt water would be gradual, but on aquafarms, the abrupt transition causes such trauma that up to 50 percent of the fish die. Many fish display signs of frustration and stress, such as continual leaping. Slaughtertime brings new traumas. Fish are often deprived of food for days or even weeks leading up to slaughter in order to reduce waste contamination of the water during transport. Some fish are killed without being stunned; their gill arches are cut and they are left to bleed to death, convulsing and showing other signs of pain. Others are killed by simply draining water away from them so that they slowly suffocate. You can make a difference. Don’t eat fish; choose a healthy, humane vegetarian diet. Aquaculture hurts birds, too Fish-eating birds are drawn to open aquaculture ponds as a source of food. Rather than using nonlethal measures to keep birds from eating the fish, such as netting the ponds, many aquafarmers simply kill the birds. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS), which issues the permits allowing the birds to be killed, has no mechanism in place to ensure that aquafarmers obey the permit limits for numbers and species of birds killed. When the National Audubon Society investigated aquaculture sites, they found massive burial pits of dead birds—far more than USFWS permits had allowed.

	AQUAFARMS WREAK HAVOC ON THE ENVIRONMENT
	Raising 1 ton of fish takes 8 tons of water. Intensive shrimp production takes up to 10 times more water. According to the journal Science, a 2-acre salmon farm produces as much waste as a town of 10,000 people. Salmon farms in British Columbia were found to be producing as much waste as a city of half a million people. Aquafarms discharge waste, pesticides, and other chemicals directly into ecologically fragile coastal waters, destroying local ecosystems. And aquaculture farms that raise fish directly in fenced-in areas of natural waters kill off thriving natural habitats by overloading them far beyond their capacity. Waste from the fish can cause huge blankets of green slime on the water’s surface, depleting oxygen and killing much of the life in the waters below. In Brazil, destruction caused by aquaculture changed the local climate so much that some aquaculture operations have been forced to shut down. And while aquafarmers like to tout aquaculture as an alternative to depleting fish populations, many of the fish species they farm are predators, like salmon and shrimp, and are fed ocean fish. It takes 5 pounds of ocean fish to produce 1 pound of farmed fish.