Tossing Mullet

Aquaculture rises globally

“Shrimp boats is a’comin” – Not so much!

Only really old people will recognize the 1951 pop song but it popped into my head with the renewed discussions locally concerning the potential for fish farms being developed along the Gulf Coast.

Wild harvest production of seafood in this country is a very small percentage of the seafood that we consume as a nation because 80 percent or so of all seafood consumed here is imported from overseas.

Of that, the vast majority is, in fact, farm-raised. This is particularly true of salmon and shrimp, seen as delicacies, and tilapia, the most mundane and practical of the trio.

There is great irony in the fact that Auburn University has taught much of the world how to grow fish in farms. This grew from the early Aid to International Development programs and in some ways fostered the growth and success of the spectacular Department of Fisheries and Allied Aquaculture at the University. This started with catfish farming, and we still produce most of the catfish that we eat, but competition from Viet Nam has become a contentious issue of late. The Auburn programs have since been duplicated at other land grant universities and the result is the dramatic success of aquaculture and its oceanic counterpart, mariculture.

My predecessor in Alabama was a true veteran of the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries (now the National Marine Fisheries Service), Dr. George Rounsefell. “Doc” (honest to God, that’s how he was known) had directed BCF labs, served several overseas posts and probably had as good an understanding of world fisheries as anybody on the planet. He was the Director of the U. of Alabama’s Marine Science Institute at Pt. aux Pins near Bayou La Batre.

It was interesting to me in 1970 when he challenged the fishery projections of some of the most pre-eminent scientists in marine biology who were based at the Woods Hole Institution of Oceanography (WHOI) in Massachusetts. This was a time when there was intense interest in global population growth and genuine concern about how we were going to feed all these people. This was the era of the growing debate concerning birth control and the heyday of the Zero Population Growth (ZPG) movement. Remember, Roe v. Wade was first argued at the Supreme Court in 1971.

But global fisheries were on a big upswing thanks to the development of sonar and navigation improvements, not to mention the bigger, faster fishing boats and crews trained by the U.S. Navy in WW II.

At any rate the relatively new specialties of marine biology and marine engineering were obsessed with the new ocean-going technologies. There were half a dozen efforts to establish human habitation on the ocean floor with “farming” seen as one of the main end goals of the effort somewhere down the road. One of the first “Sea Lab”s was a federally sponsored habitat experiment offshore from my alma mater, Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

The marine biologists at WHOI were the world experts in what is termed “primary production.” That’s simply the growth of plants from sunlight. The difference in the ocean is that the plants are largely microscopic in size but the ocean is so big that there is a god-awful lot of it out there. Global sunlight measurements had been made and oceanic plant abundance was beginning to be pretty well estimated.

So the eminent experts did the appropriate calculations and determined that the ocean could easily produce 200 million metric tons of fish suitable for human consumption. That was a lot of “cans of tuna,” given that the world was harvesting maybe 40 million metric tons of fish then and the population growth estimates weren’t higher by a factor 5 – so life was good and marine biology should obviously be highly funded in order to guarantee solving the projected world food crisis.

But an elderly retired BCF scientist, running a penny ante laboratory on a peninsula in Mississippi Sound – at the end of a dirt road in Alabama, for God’s sake – had the temerity to challenge those projections and he did it through letters to the editor of one of the most prestigious fishery journals in the world! The exchange of letters between the institutions is a classic in the world of fishery science. The amazing thing was that in 1970, Doc predicted a dramatic flattening of global fish harvest by 1985-1990 and he was dead on! He thought the wild harvest would top out at about 85 million metric tons meaning we were already half way to capacity at the time of the debate – not at 20 percent as projected by the Massachusetts experts.

The laughter from the Yankees could be heard all the way to Bayou La Batre.

In the last couple of decades of the 20th century we pushed the catch to a tad over 100 million metric tons by developing processing technologies that allowed us to eat croaker and a variety of smaller species in the form of breaded fish sticks. But there it has ended with the economic demise of many fisheries, predictions of further catastrophic collapse by mid-century and now the feeble yet draconian efforts to rebuild wild stocks.

We have not made the necessary investments in research that would provide data and understanding of our fisheries. The recent debacles over LNG terminals provide the best local example of that truth. But Doc did believe that the application of farming technology was the only hope for boosting the food supply at a global and human scale.

With the exception of offshore salmon farms the majority of the “farm” products are produced in coastal pond settings. In this country we have created coastal land values that make the latter approach economically infeasible at this time, either because of the view or a recognition of the ecosystem services (growing baby shrimp, crab and speckled trout) provided. That may change if food really gets scarce.

Consequently we will have to take a good hard look at the concept of the offshore farms, perhaps utilizing some of the natural gas platform infrastructure that is about to be come obsolete with the depletion of our reserves in and off Alabama. There are legitimate concerns about the environmental impacts and the alteration of our coastal landscape in many ways but have you ever looked at the former prairie landscape of the Midwest from an airplane? There’s barely a shred that hasn’t been converted to agriculture!

Even silviculture undermines fundamental ecosystem principles. E. O. Wilson once described our pine forest as a “60’ tall cornfield”. I raise the issue somewhat reluctantly but there are too many of us and not enough of “it” – whether “it” be clean water or air, beaches and dunes, unaltered land or waterscapes, birds to photograph, snakes for little boys to scare their sister with, fish to catch (or eat) -for us to stomp our foot and say we don’t have to change the way we do things!

Editor’s note: Dr. George Crozier has agreed to rejoin the Dauphin Island Sea Lab for the next couple of years and will discontinue his column with Lagniappe while working there. We have greatly enjoyed having George write with us and hope to have him back when his service to the state is over. Good luck George and thanks for taking the time to write in Lagniappe.

George Crozier is Lagniappe columnist. Contact him at george@lagniappemobile.com.

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