Aquaculture Ecology (SUSTAINABLE OCEAN FOODS) with Ben Halpern

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Oh, hey, it's the waitress who forgot your margarita, Allie Ward, and you are here to learn about farming stuff in the ocean or your home or a lake or whatever.

Last week, we got to the bottom of how kelp sticks to the seafloor and what seaweed is and how it's not plants, but you can eat it.

And this week, as promised, we are diving into aquaculture, which is apparently very heated topic.

So, I'm talking to a wonderful marine biologist I was lucky enough to meet and spend time with two years back.

I was on Catalina Island at USC's Wrigley Institute for Environment Environment and Sustainability.

There is a storymaker symposium they do where I was left on an island with a bunch of climate scientists via Liz Neely and Ed Yang to give this talk on SciComm to some people who are just trying to save planet Earth.

It was a good time.

They were all cool as hell.

And I've interviewed several for this show, including this one who studied biology at Carleton College and then went on to get a PhD.

in ecology, evolution, and marine biology at UC Santa Barbara.

They are the lead scientists for the Ocean Health Index Project.

They co-founded the Conservation Aquaculture Research Team.

They're a professor at UC Santa Barbara's Bren School of Environmental Science and Management and the director of the UCSB National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis.

Now on the island two years ago, we chatted next to a boat on a dock and I said, I'm coming to your house to talk to you about farmed fish one day.

Deal with it.

And they did.

And here we are.

And we're going to get to the episode in just a minute.

But first, thank you to all the patrons who sent in questions for this episode.

You can do so for as little as a dollar a month via patreon.com slash ologies.

Thank you for wearing my name on your body via ologiesmerch.com.

And thank you for $0 for leaving reviews, which truly helped the show and my mental health more than you'll ever know, such as this one from Cap Oneie, who wrote, this podcast is like gently flipping over a log, expecting to find a handful of roly pullies or maybe a millipede, but instead finding those lovely critters a salamander and the infectious excitement of passionate people talking about anything and everything

right on the money that's honestly one of the best compliments ever so cap 1e let's set sail for some fish stuff okay so i headed up to santa barbara it was this gorgeous saturday i was with your pod mother jarrett say hi

Hello, everyone.

Good work.

And we also brought our 12-year-old daughter, who is a dog, to this guest's gorgeous, century-old historical landmark of a preserved home.

And we prayed our dog would not pee in it, even though she never pees inside.

And that part went well.

So, this guest has studied ecology from locales, including the Caribbean and the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, Solomon Islands, Indonesia.

They've been to various parts of the South Pacific and California and Chile.

And they know their stuff in terms of how to save the things living in the ocean.

One way is to not overfish it.

So, consider this episode a long overdue look at that topic.

So, all aboard to hear about what percent of your fish menu is farmed versus wild, and how to tell if you should enjoy a cruise ship shrimp buffet, where oysters are even coming from, bycatch, fish guilds, animal welfare of our aquatic friends, the anthropology of ordering the fish, salmon who wear makeup, where we're at with global marine populations, why you can ditch iceberg lettuce for seaweed, the marine treats you can feel not terrible about eating, and the ones you kind of could feel terrible about eating, and a gentle nudge toward a more plant-based diet with super cool dude, researcher, and aquaculture ecologist, Dr.

Ben Halpern.

My name is Ben Halpern, he, him.

I am a professor at the University of California Santa Barbara and the director of an environmental science research center called the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis.

Easy to say.

Easy to say.

We go, NCIS is how we say it.

A lot of people know it, so we keep it.

But I'm open to someone giving a lot of money, and I'll change the name.

You're like, can I get a rebrand?

Yeah.

Money in science,

not the easiest thing to come by.

So you'll save it for the aquaculture.

Exactly.

Here we go.

Have you always been somewhat of a water baby?

Are you a Pisces?

What drew you to marine stuff?

I am.

I'm a Scorpio.

I'm born in November.

Twins.

Feel good, though.

No, it's the classic story of like, I grew up in Oregon.

I would go to the coast with my family.

The coast is beautiful there.

My mom is a biology teacher, so she'd take me into the tide pools and identify the critters.

So that, and then, you know, it's just beautiful lakes and rivers.

And so I'd go swimming in the streams over the summer and stuff like that.

So that's how I kind of got connected to the ocean.

And after college, I was working for years doing nothing connected to the ocean.

But I was living in Boston and I started volunteering at the New England Aquarium.

Oh.

And I was like, this is pretty awesome.

Yeah, dream.

And then I got a job actually doing typo critters for first to third grade classes where I'd load them up into the van and drive all over New England.

Seeing their excitement got me excited.

And I was like, I want to do marine conservation.

So his college life didn't have much to do with the ocean.

And after college, he was working at MIT.

He says doing...

computer stuff, but it wasn't rewarding any inner passion.

And he wanted to connect back to nature.

And hence, the New England Aquarium in Boston caught his eye and his heart.

And so I volunteered for a while as a docent in the aquarium.

And I don't know if you've been, but they have this giant center tank that's a coral reef.

And it's four stories tall.

And so you can spiral around it.

And it's just magical space.

So when volunteering and catching the contagious enthusiasm of taking fourth graders to look at hermit crabs, he wanted to switch his life path.

And he asked around about a future in marine conservation.

And people told him, you'd better do some graduate school, my dude.

You're like graduate school gotta do it

do you start just applying at different places that are near the water or how does that work well yeah I was looking for a program that was good in marine biology I looked at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, which is outside of Boston.

I look at Scripps, which is at San Diego, UC Santa Barbara, University of Miami, University of Hawaii, and University of Washington.

I was like, I got to cover every corner.

Yeah.

I really didn't know where I wanted to go.

I didn't really actually know what I was doing.

I was like, I need a graduate degree in order to get this job I want.

So I guess I should apply to graduate school.

And I was living in Boston.

And so I knew that corner of the world.

And I was like, well, I need to go visit California to check out the schools there.

And I booked my trip to go in January.

And I landed in Santa Barbara.

It was like 75 degrees out.

I was like, I think I'm going to come here.

And he's been there ever since.

And the day that I'm there, it's like 72 degrees, clear skies, bees buzzing around his native garden plants.

And the beach is about two miles away.

Just heaven.

Casual Californian paradise.

But then you have to get in, right?

So I ended up getting into UC Santa Barbara.

And then I was like, well, I'm definitely coming here.

Yeah.

But after the first year in graduate school, I was like, I love this science stuff.

Oh, cool.

And I was like, I think I'm going to stick around for a PhD.

And so I did.

And yeah, never left science after that.

Did you study aquaculture for your PhD?

No.

I was a classic kind of marine ecologist.

My advisor had a house in St.

Croix in the U.S.

Virgin Islands.

Wow.

A summer field station house.

I spent my summers in the Virgin Islands.

chasing coral reef fish to count them.

But I also was doing conservation research on the side, but I was all about like, I'm going to save the oceans.

And at that time, we can talk about this more later, the narrative around aquaculture is that it was awful.

Really?

Terrible, terrible for the ocean.

And it's the worst thing you can do.

And so I was very much an anti-aquaculture person.

Such a hater, dude.

I didn't even think I would ever study it, let alone like embrace it.

And so I was very much on the like, we got to keep that out of the ocean.

And I was focusing on things that we could do to protect biodiversity and yeah, help the oceans.

Well,

you know, I asked not smart questions.

So what exactly is aquaculture?

Is it farming of kelp?

Is it having

doughboys full of shrimp in your basement?

Like, what exactly is it?

I mean, technically, it's farming sea creatures or sea things, ocean things, although freshwater aquaculture is also aquaculture.

So it's farming.

But you're farming in water instead of farming on land.

That's like the basic definition.

Okay.

And then you can farm all sorts of things.

So there's hundreds and hundreds of species that are farmed in aquaculture.

There's all sorts of seaweeds.

There's a whole bunch of shellfish, mussels, clams, shrimp, things like that.

And then tons of different species of finfish, the fish that actually have fins and swim around.

So, yeah, I mean, across the planet, I think there's something six, seven, eight hundred species that are farmed.

It's very, very diverse.

It's not like agriculture on land where we've got our seven dominant crops of corn, wheat, rice, etc.

Like, it's really, really diverse in aquaculture.

Why did it get such a bad rap?

Why, especially at that time, where people like, fuck aquaculture.

Yes.

Well, also, I'm so sorry that my dog is absolutely taking over your house.

She just had, is that okay?

She headed upstairs.

There is cat food up there.

Grammy, she looks guilty.

Okay, so people

were pissed about aquaculture.

So in the early days, it was bad.

So it deserved the negative reputation.

So the big

early growth in aquaculture was in shrimp and in salmon.

And they still are two of the most commonly grown aquaculture species.

But in the 80s, when it was really taking off and into the early 90s, shrimp farms are grown right along the coast and they're warm water.

And so they're particularly good in kind of calm, enclosed bays where mangroves grow.

And so the shrimp farmers were cutting down huge amounts of mangrove forest to make room for the shrimp ponds.

And this occurs in places like Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam, but also in South America, like Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela, are seeing steep declines, according to the 2001 paper, Mangrove Forests, one of the world's threatened major tropical environments.

And while there are over 50 different species of mangroves, a mangrove area can have a lot of different species that are growing in tandem with it.

And they can grow in saltwater on the ocean's coast.

And their dense green habitat and their barriers to erosion started to disappear off the horizon, replaced with these expanses of ponds laid out in grids.

So something like 30% of the world's mangroves were cut down by shrimp farms back in the 80s and 90s.

Oh, yikes.

Do they grow back?

They do.

Okay, okay.

And there's a lot of restoration effort and actually things are coming back.

And so there's ways of...

saving grace there, but it was pretty bad in the 80s.

And that's when I was basically growing up and learning about about this stuff.

But even the best restoration efforts mean potential decades of that lush ecosystem trying to fully recover.

And then salmon farms, when in the early days, they had a lot of pollution.

They weren't really super well managed.

They were also in protected areas, so like in the Norwegian fjords or the British Columbia fjords.

because it's really protected water, but you don't get a lot of circulation.

And so they would feed them and the food would drop to the bottom.

And then they would get this burst of algae and other things on the bottom and it would suck away all the oxygen and create a dead zone under the farms.

And so

they were not so good.

Plus you had to harvest a whole bunch of wild caught fish in order to feed the salmon.

So you were taking from the ocean.

And so there were problems with it that justified the negative reputation.

So that's what I came into graduate school with that same narrative in my head of like, this is what aquaculture is and it's bad.

So we can jump into it now.

But like I totally accidentally stumbled into aquaculture.

I did not seek it out as a research direction.

And yeah, it's a huge pivot point in my career.

Well, this is just a technicality, but when they're doing that, do they have all the fish in nets or do they dam up the end of a mangrove where it meets the sea?

How are they, do they have cages like a shark cage, but skinnier bars?

I don't know how people aquaculture.

Yeah, so it depends on what you're growing.

So shrimp ponds, they basically take away the mangroves or whatever there.

They build a little earthen wall to create a pond, and then they flood it with water, and then they put the baby shrimp in there, and they grow the shrimp, and often they have like a bubbler to keep aerated.

So that's what they do for shrimp farms.

They do something like that for like tilapia, too.

That's more of a freshwater species.

So those are ponds where they form like a wall, usually out of dirt.

For almost all of the fin fish, the ones that swim around with fins, like salmon or sea bass or whatever, those are in cages.

And we can talk about this, but the technology in cages now is insane.

But what do they do?

Oh my god.

So, in the early days, they were just like a net with floating wood buoys to hold up the edge of the net, and they would just stay in like a basket of a net and then they would get fed.

Now, like the Chinese have built these things that look like sci-fi oil rig structures.

They're enormous.

They're so huge, they're 10 stories tall, hundreds of feet wide, and they can hold like 2 million fish at a time.

So the technology has scaled this up to just unbelievable scales from what it used to be.

However, most aquaculture is small.

It's like mom-and-pop aquaculture.

And you can have, or if you have seaweed, you can just stick a stick in the mud, and seaweed will, or algae will grow on it.

Or you can have ropes hanging down from buoys that you can put the little seaweed spores on and they'll grow from that.

And last week we talked to Dr.

Charlie Yarish, the chief scientist at greenwave.org and the so-called grandfather of seaweed farming, all about different types of kelp and seaweed and where it's grown and how nori is a red seaweed and kelp is a brown seaweed which has captured red seaweeds and it sells like pets.

But yeah, the seaweed farming industry has been growing in the last few decades.

It's interesting, but you know, it's out of necessity you see, and today we find in Western countries we need to expand food production.

People don't realize that the land can only bear so much fruit and we want to be able to minimize adding too much fertilizer or pesticides.

And that's what really now is taking place in North America, in Europe, Scandinavia.

We're seeing this expanding.

And we're very much approaching the capability of going to scale.

The only problem what we see is the markets haven't caught up with us.

Right.

So yeah, ropes, buoys, kelp.

That's how they do a lot of mussels and oysters.

They put them on rope lines and they put the little seeds on there.

They call the baby's seeds.

And then they just grow out in the ocean and they pull up the line and harvest them that way.

Well, is there a really big difference between doing

macro algae and kelp versus doing animals?

Like, is the kelp like, whew, thank you for the carbon sink?

But the animals are like,

okay, you're depleting some natural sources.

Like, is there a big division?

Yes.

Or am I making up the drama?

No, no.

It's well, so most people who think negatively of aquaculture are focusing on the fish side of it.

But shellfish, the oysters and mussels and clams, the things with shells, and seaweed are actually quite good for the environment.

This is the thing that I learned through doing all this research is like the many benefits that come from these kinds kinds of aquaculture.

So for example, algae and kelp, they pull nutrients out of the water.

So you can actually use it as a pollution remediation technique for coastal waters.

If you've got, you know, runoff from land, you wouldn't necessarily, well, you could eat it because it's just taking nitrogen from fertilizers that's run off the land that can cause problems in coastal oceans.

And yeah, when you said coastal runoff, I was like, like mercury?

But no, it's like nitrogen, which just comes from fertilizers, which is just a nutrient that they can use.

It's like miracle grow, but for kelp, right?

Exactly.

And from sewage, as we learned in last week's seaweed episode.

And they also pull carbon in, so it's called sequestering carbon.

So they're not a major solution to fighting climate change, but they help a little bit.

And then they create habitat.

So there's a lot of creatures that love to swim around in there, little fish or other invertebrates.

And it's the same with mussels and clams and oysters.

They also create habitat.

They also filter the water as they eat.

And so you don't have to to feed these things.

They're just naturally fed by the ocean.

Because mussels and oysters and clams are filter feeders, so they're just eating those usual plant and tiny animal plankton and poop and stuff.

And according to an article titled, Can Clams and Oysters Help Clean Up Waterways?

via Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, adult oysters can reportedly filter up to 50 gallons of water a day and help rebalance the water quality.

And this article says that too much nitrogen, often from fertilizer runoff and septic tanks, boosts the growth of algae, which overwhelm water bodies and ultimately reduce oxygen levels in them.

And oysters, clams, and other shellfish are efficient filter feeders that help remove excess nitrogen from waters by incorporating it into their shells and tissues as they grow.

And also, shellfish farms tend to be heavily monitored for water quality.

Some other stuff you'd want out of the water gets filtered by them and then pooped into the sediment.

So thank a shellfish next time you see one.

And growing filter feeders doesn't require dumping a bunch of smelt or soy into a pond for them.

So there's none of that input and risk of pollution from overfeeding things that happens sometimes with fin fish.

And so when I talk to people now about, like, if you want some guilt-free food to eat,

farmed shellfish.

Unless you're a vegan or allergic to shellfish.

But people think, oh, does that mean shrimp?

Shrimp are called shellfish, but shellfish shellfish, I think, of the bivalves with two shells that clamp together.

So oysters and clams and mussels, these things, well, and seaweed, guilt-free.

Most people don't eat seaweed, but lots of people eat shellfish.

And yeah, they take no inputs.

Once you put them in there, they grow on their own.

They help clean the water.

They create habitat.

They're great.

Well, I think a lot of people think shrimp and they think, I'm just getting the bugs of the sea.

Look how little they are.

It's kind of like eating crickets.

Side note, we do have an episode all about eating bugs and it's called Entomophagy Anthropology.

We'll link it in the show notes.

And I've also heard that aquaculture with shrimp, maybe

the labor used is not above board.

Is that still an issue?

It is.

I don't know a whole lot about it.

Because most shrimp are grown like in Ecuador or Vietnam and other parts of Southeast Asia.

because the conditions are good for that.

There's some shrimp farming in Africa too.

These also tend to be countries that aren't quite as wealthy as like the United States.

And so there's incentive to find ways to do it more cost-effectively.

And I'm sorry, shrimp lovers, one of whom is me.

There's a lot of problems with shrimp too.

When you grow something really, really high density, there's issues of disease.

And like when you pack a whole bunch of people together in a room, there's disease transmission, right?

Same thing with the little shrimpies.

And so...

They have these disease outbreaks that'll wipe out whole ponds.

So they use a lot of antibiotics to try to fight that.

So there's a lot of that kind of pollution input into the ponds.

And then if they get a disease outbreak, they just bust open the pond and flush it out into the ocean and then start over.

Right.

So yeah, shrimp, I actually don't eat shrimp because of that unless it's wild-caught and carefully.

There's some really, like here in Santa Barbara, there's a spot prom that's wild-caught and it's totally sustainable to eat.

So I eat those, but I don't eat farmed shrimp.

And I understand if you live in the Monterey Bay area and you like smaller urchins and you can dive for them, those little purple urchins, you can get like 50 a day per permit and just load up because of the kelp forest.

There's too many urchins.

They call them urchin barons, where they like mow down the kelp and they just get this blanket of urchins on the seafloor.

And urchins are crazy, we're digressing, but urchins are crazy.

They can live for a really, really long time without eating.

And so if there's not enough food for them, they just sit there and wait.

And they can wait years.

And so if you crack them open and they haven't been eating, they're basically hollow.

There's nothing in there.

Oh, whoa.

It's basically a hollow test, a hollow shell.

So they've actually started an urchin ranch, which I just love the idea.

This urchin ranch, I looked it up, is called Ooni.

It's spelled O-O-N-E-E.

And they make the compelling argument that after decimating a kelp forest and creating an urchin barren, starving urchin will lie dormant for many years only to start feasting on any newly regenerated kelp.

And I do want to mention that we have an echinodology episode about sea urchins specifically.

And in it we do discuss why they like to wear tiny small cowboy hats, which seems appropriate for a ranch that involves a buffet for them because they're hungry.

So you go harvest the urchins from the ocean.

when they maybe haven't had enough food and then you put them into a tank and you give them good food like they just eat seaweed and kelp and stuff like that.

After, I don't know, I think it's a couple weeks or maybe a little longer, they'll kind of fatten up, they'll grow the insides back, and then you can harvest them and then you've got good uni.

And when it comes to oysters and scallops, we've done an episode on scallops.

We learned about diver scallops versus farmed.

But how do you know?

I imagine the diver scallops are not as sustainable.

The diver ones are okay because they're kind of, they're supposed to be anyway, kind of hand-picked and more selectively harvested.

It's the big trawls that just scooped up the whole seafloor to get scallops.

Those are the ones that are not sustainable.

So when you go to the rest one and they say diver scallops, if they're honest, and they actually are, those are sustainable from a wild-caught fishery.

It's the ones that don't label that.

And then usually, yeah, farm scallops, if you can get them, are great.

And we talk about their farming in the pectinidology episode about scallops, but it involves baby scallops having a a notch or a hole through part of their shell and then a sort of a scallop banner or a scallop festoon gets strung together in the water until they're harvested, unless they're diver scallops, in which case they're harvested by a diver who goes down and roots around in the sand like a mermaid who wants to feed you.

What about oysters?

How do you know?

Almost all oysters are farmed.

That's good news.

It is.

Right?

And we love oysters, right?

And we get all into the provenance of, oh, these are the oysters from this bay or that bay.

And if you like oysters, you can actually taste the difference.

It's just like wines or beers.

They've got a different flavor to them.

And so it's really fun from a culinary perspective to go try all these different oysters.

Do you still have to worry about warmer conditions?

Like only eat oysters in months that have an R?

There are not a whole lot of wild oyster populations out there that people can harvest.

But yes, that is true.

That's when you get these blooms of cyanobacteria or dinoflagellobacteria that cause the domoic acid.

So the algae that has a toxin in it, when it blooms in these seasons when the water is the right conditions, it builds up these blooms of the algae and they have this toxin in domoic acid.

And then it bioconcentrates in their tissue.

And so I don't know if you've been to the beach in the last month or two, but there's a lot of dead animals.

There's dead seals, cormorants, there's even been some dead dolphins on the beach because they are eating things that have been eating the shellfish that we're eating, the little microalgae that have this toxin in them and it gets worse and worse as it gets further up the food chain.

That's why you get that recommendation to not eat them in those particular seasons.

But oysters, because they're almost entirely farmed, the oyster farm is basically doing that for you.

They're paying attention to that and harvesting them when they're good and not harvesting them when you can't do that.

How do you feel about tanks of shrimp in people's basements as they get rich quick scheme?

Have you seen this?

I have not.

There's a Reddit thread that's like, get on my level.

You want to make money, people?

All you need is two big tanks, some big bubblers.

You farm shrimp in your basement.

You're going to be a millionaire before you know it.

And is this a viable strategy?

I do not think so.

It is not easy to get.

like the balance of everything just right to avoid disease outbreaks and to like make sure your water is not getting contaminated and feeding them just right.

I'm definitely not going to be doing it in my basement.

Yeah.

It is not, I can't fathom it being a big moneymaker.

What about homestead living where it's like get yourself a chicken coop over a tilapia farm.

They eat the poop.

You get the tilapia.

Yeah.

Is that viable?

I don't know what I can't place what tilapia tastes like.

It's super bland.

It's a very white bland fish so people like it because you can then flavor it with other stuff.

It doesn't have much flavor on its own.

But yeah, that's like this kind of mixed systems.

I mean, they're doing it in aquaculture too, where you can combine algae or seaweed and shellfish and fish together.

Because, yeah, the poop from the fish can help feed the shellfish.

And then the algae or the seaweed can help clean the water.

So you get this like harmonious connection between the systems.

So yeah, you can do that on land too.

I mean, it's like a mixed agriculture system where you can get chicken poop feeding the tilapia and and then you can eat the tilapia.

You can do that with crops and other things too.

What is happening since you've been working in it that you've seen like big shifts in aquaculture that are exciting?

What are you like, yes, we're going in the right direction?

Well, farmers of animals have to feed their animals, right?

Yeah.

And so this has always been one of the problems with any farm system, but with aquaculture is how efficient are you at turning feed into animal that we can then eat.

And this is one of the big problems with salmon in the early days.

It would take something like five pounds of wild-caught fish to grow one pound of salmon.

So the conversion ratio is pretty terrible there.

And that was why people were very upset about it.

So it used to be five to one.

For comparison, for cows, it's like eight to one.

It takes eight pounds of feed to create one pound of cow.

There's many problems with cows, but that's one of them.

Now, the conversion ratio for salmon is about one to one.

Oh, how did they do that?

Right.

So what's cool about aquaculture is you can combine like entrepreneurship and thinking creatively with technology and innovation and you're growing food.

And farmers are on land are doing this too, but it's really exciting what's happening in aquaculture too.

And so the innovations in feed are where there's some really exciting stuff happening where you're seeing the whole industry change because we're developing new kinds of feed.

So one of the ways they did that was actually replacing

fish with things like soy and other plant-based proteins.

And they can do that to a point they can't do it completely because the fish eat fish.

They need it naturally.

I always like to remind people, wild salmon eat fish too.

Yeah.

Right.

And their conversion ratio is much worse.

Okay.

So farmed salmon has one of the lowest feed conversion ratios of all animal protein with about 1.15 to 1.

Chicken is 2.

Pork can be up to 5.

And according to a paper in an environmental research series called Redefining Agricultural Yields from Tons to People Nourished Per Hectare, livestock production is the single largest anthropogenic use of land.

And around 75%

of all agricultural land is dedicated to animal production.

And animal products.

even on land generally have a much higher water footprint than plant-based foods.

But yes, the feed conversion ratio of farm salmon is lower than wild caught.

Okay.

Right.

Cause they got to go hunt and find it and they don't always catch it.

And so the amount of effort and what they can actually get out of eating the fish they do is much less than if you hand it to them in a cage and they don't even have to work for it.

So it's much more efficient actually feeding farmed salmon than it is in wild systems.

I was wondering that because I was like, the wild system

also takes a while for them to grow to maturity.

Exactly.

And catching it, there's a lot of bycatch, right?

Exactly.

So not a lot of bycatch, but anyway, there's some stuff that's not meant to be caught, but it's just a lot of effort and it takes a lot of fuel to go chase those fish.

I love wild salmon.

Wild salmon are great too, so I'm not trying to like diminish that.

But you get so many people who are like, I'm only going to eat wild salmon.

And I'm like, well, actually, farmed salmon is pretty good too.

So yeah, the feed innovation is really exciting, the stuff that's happening there.

And there's all sorts of new innovations in feed that use bacteria or like wood pulp that they can ferment basically.

And then you can get byproducts from that that you can then use as feed.

And so they're starting to develop ways to grow all the feed you need in a tank and not have to take any fish out of the sea or any crops from land.

And they were not there yet, but that's where it's heading.

And so I think there's just a lot of really cool innovations in how to grow finfish.

more environmentally friendly.

Well, how do they synthesize what they need from like a plant protein?

And I know human beings, obviously, a plant-based human being is going to be like, hello, I'm a flesh and blood person that hasn't eaten meat since fourth grade.

How do the salmon convert that?

Yeah, so you'd hear about like omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids.

So there's components of what come from the ocean that are super important.

But you can grow those kinds of...

components, the fatty acids that are these omega-3 and omega-6s in tanks and algae.

The reason they're in the fish is because it's the wild algae and plankton.

That's where it comes from.

And they eat that.

And then that's why you get it from sardines and anchovies and why the salmon have it, because it's up the food chain.

It started from algae.

Please see last week's companion episode on seaweed because y'all, algae, more like palgae.

because seaweed is your friend.

That's what we learned.

And Ben says that aquaculture farmers can actually grow some supplemental foods in labs and kind of tinker with the amount of protein the farmed fish are getting and make sure that their microbiomes are optimal.

Although, you should note the fish can be food deprived before harvest to empty out their guts.

And when they're harvested, it's usually by percussive stunning, which is a blow to the head or electrical stunning.

And older methods, like just taking them out of the water, are being phased out for those somewhat more humane stunning methods.

But if you are looking for the most guilt-free meat, please see our Roadkill Ecology episode with Ben Goldfarve.

Roadkill, it's what's for dinner.

But if you're eating meat, you just have to come to terms that it involves some sad stuff.

Living in the planet involves some sad stuff.

Having a house means a lot of animals were killed and displaced.

It's just

sad stuff.

So it's a bunch of tinkering.

These farmers and research and development labs have been for decades figuring out all the ways they can substitute this versus that and try to figure out how to optimize what the food looks like what it's made of in order to make the fastest healthiest fish well what about the bioaccumulation of like heavy metals like we hear obviously with big tunas

yeah don't even think about eating tuna every single day.

Does that happen with fin fish too?

Other fin fish, that is.

Sure.

I mean, it depends on what water you're you're growing it in.

So you want to make sure you're not growing it in super polluted water.

But most farmers are pretty aware of that.

So, like, the fjords of Norway have beautiful, clean water because there's not much going into them.

Same with the fjords of British Columbia.

There's an amazing farm, not of salmon, but of this fish called campache.

That's a type of tuna that's grown on Hawaii.

The waters are crystal clear.

So, a lot of aquaculture is purposefully put in really good water.

And actually, there's, they call it offshore aquaculture where you push the farms further offshore.

And they're doing that because the water flows stronger there and kind of flushes it out and keeps it from having to worry so much about pollutants from heavy metals and stuff like that.

In general, you're probably safer with farmed fish, or at least they're checking it and they're being careful about it.

A wild fish, you don't know where it's been.

I always wonder, how come no one's there in the rivers in spawning season in Alaska?

Just, it's like Snicker bars, just a river of Snickers bars going past you.

Like, how come no one's sitting there with a bucket?

Oh, they are.

They are.

They're called bears.

Yeah.

You've seen Fat Bear Week, right?

I love Fat Bear Week.

Oh, I love it.

You can see our two-part ursinology episode all about bears to learn more about this, as well as things like the Arctic means it has bears.

Antarctic literally means there's no bears.

Also, betting on the absolute dump trucks of bears before they go into hibernation is a joy everyone should experience.

Glutes of a god.

They are built with fish.

So yeah, certainly the indigenous communities have long done that up there, but Alaskans all have a quota that they're given as residents of the state that they can go with these nets and they just like stand at the edge of the river and just scoop up.

Salmon, I have relatives who are in Alaska and every year they do that and they fill their freezers with just hundreds of salmon, and then they eat them all year long.

Well, let's say that you have a special occasion, or you're cooking for a date, and you want to be like, I got salmon from the farmer's market or whatever, from the fish market.

Let's say you're going to have some salmon.

How do you know that you're getting

ones that are more sustainable from a good farm where they're treating people well and fish well?

How do you shop for that?

Yeah.

Obviously there's a lot of people who focus on wild caught versus farmed salmon.

Wildcaught is still good.

For the farmed salmon, there are places like the Norwegians are very, very, very careful and invest a lot of resources in doing things as sustainably as possible.

So if it's Norwegian, you're good.

In general, that's true of Scottish salmon.

The people from Scotland do not like the salmon farms there because they want nature to be unadulterated, but it's good growing conditions and the Scottish salmon farms are generally seen as really good.

In Chile, there are some farms that people are less happy with and then there are some that are better and that's where it gets a little bit more confusing because you don't know which farm it came from.

So I would say if you can see where it came from, like Norwegian and Scottish salmon, farm salmon, are generally seen as really good options.

There used to be salmon farms in Washington state.

Those have since been closed down.

Oh, how come?

because the people didn't want them there yeah how come people generally don't want them there is it the space the sea acreage they take up the main issue is concern about polluting the wild populations of salmon okay what happened there was a huge um

a storm came through and the salmon farm company hadn't maintained their pen quite well enough

and it got basically sunk and ripped open and like something like 300,000 salmon swam free.

I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams.

And they went all over, right?

And most of them die because they can't handle the wild.

They don't know how to feed.

If they'd survive, which not many did, there's a harsh truth to face.

No way I'm going to make it on the outside.

They don't know how to breed, but occasionally it happens.

And that's the concern that they will genetically pollute the wild populations.

And

salmon is sacrosanct in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska.

It's like culturally so, so important.

People just didn't want that risk anymore.

And there are salmon farms in British Columbia still, but the political pressure is to take those out as well.

What about, you mentioned Chile.

What about like Chilean sea bass?

I understand it's kind of threatened.

This, just in, Chilean sea bass are giant and they can live for up to 50 years, which is, I guess, why their face looks like a grandpa falling asleep drunk in a recliner.

And in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, every yuppie menu featured this cold water whitefish to the point where populations could not rebound on their own.

And there were crackdowns and it's doing much better now.

It's rated yellow, not great, not the worst, when it's caught by South African fisheries in the Prince Edward Islands, but it's red-rated,

don't do it, when it's caught in Chile.

And just a side note, Chilean sea bass is actually called Patagonian toothfish.

And toothfish versus sea bass, it's a lot like when my goth friend Ben asked us to call him Sebastian.

It's a good rebrand.

Yeah.

Are they using aquaculture to cultivate types of fish that are not doing well in the wild?

They are.

And there's like a market dynamic that's behind that.

Like, oh, if you can flood the market with a farmed version of it, then the value of the wild-caught one will go down and it won't be economically viable anymore.

And then the fishery will effectively shut down and that's a way to protect the species.

It's questionable how well it can work.

It's basically it's hard to flood the market enough to kind of do that.

There's another fish in the Gulf of California called the Tatoaba which its fish bladder is seen as a medicinal cure in a lot of Chinese medicine.

So it's super high value.

And it's been overfished and it's very, very few of them left.

And they've been trying to farm this fish to basically provide a source of this swim bladder medicine, but they just can't go fast enough, and there's still pressure to catch them in the wild.

And so, yes, people are thinking about doing that.

How effective it'll be is pretty uncertain.

This fish is also called a weak fish, which seems unnecessarily mean, but the price is powerful.

The swim bladder, or its maw, of this six-foot-long fish is prized for fertility and skin remedies and some circulatory medicines.

And one maw can fetch 10 to 15 Gs, which

I read about it.

It rivals the street value of gold and cocaine.

And in fact, in 2023, U.S.

Customs seized 91 poached swim bladders of this endangered fish.

They were hidden among some other fish fillets, valued at $1.4 million.

And that was probably not even including the cost cost of the fish fillets, which was like $35.

Now, I don't know what border agents did with the $1.4 million of fish bladders, but I have a feeling it wasn't the same vibe as like finding a briefcase of cocaine.

And then what comes across your desk?

Do you have farms being like, Ben, help me out?

I got too much food on the bottom.

Or like, are there conferences?

What is going on in the community that I am not privy to?

There's a conference on everything, Ali.

Of course.

But yes, there's definitely a conference on aquaculture.

There's a lot of ways of connecting.

So, no, I don't get called by farms because that's really the like R ⁇ D development side.

And that's not the kind of research I do of like, how do you make a slightly better feed?

I'm much more interested in thinking about how aquaculture fits into the broader ecology and ecosystem and how we can think about integrating it into our conservation planning and strategies for making the oceans as healthy as possible while still meeting the needs of people.

So it's really that bigger picture type of questions that I look at with my research.

So Ben isn't the bat phone for fisheries trying to maximize their profit.

He's on the academic side.

He's doing studies.

He's crunching numbers to figure out the best way to counter wild population depletion.

For example, how does aquaculture compare to all other kinds of foods in terms of its environmental footprint, right?

That's the kind of question I ask in my research.

So, no, I don't get calls from the farms of like, how do I make my feed better?

Or

I'd have to just say sorry.

But

yeah.

And I don't tend to go to conferences anymore because of a lot of reasons, but environmental cost of travel for conferences too.

But they are very exciting, and that's where a lot of these like side discussions happen.

So he is not out there working with a farm to figure out how to make salmon flesh pinker.

How do you even do that?

We have so many questions.

We have questions from listeners.

Okay.

And they're good ones.

All right.

Can I ask them of you?

Please.

Okay, but first, money.

Let's give some away to Ben's choice, which is nceas.ucsb.edu, which established in 1995 was the first synthesis science center in the world.

And their approach has helped transform ecology and environmental science to generate bigger insights and inform solutions more efficiently.

So that donation will go to research continuing to improve our ecosystems.

So thanks, Ben.

And thank you, sponsors, for making that possible.

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Now, many of you wondered about farmed salmon, such as Matt Thompson, Scott Hanley, Olivier Callis, Louise Reynolds, Kristen Annie, and Kat Backlars.

And I was tickled pink that Delhi Dames wanted to know: is it bad when the farmed salmon are super orange?

Farmed salmon, not as pink as wild, say sockeye.

What do they feed them?

Or is that a concern?

Do people see a too light salmon and go, not for me?

No, yeah.

So the pink comes from the little shrimp that the wild salmon are eating out there.

And they have the pink in them and that's what turns their flesh pink.

So yeah, if you don't feed that to the farmed salmon, their flesh will be...

almost white.

It's not quite.

It's more of a yellow color.

So they can either feed that to them in the farm or they dye it.

And so I guess it's hard to not pay attention to the color.

Yeah.

Farm salmon tends to be a little fattier too.

So you'll see the lines between the muscle tissue will be slightly wider in farmed salmon.

So some people don't like that either.

I actually

kind of like it.

It makes it easier to cook.

It's harder to overcook it because you have a little more fat in there and it helps keep it moisture.

And so from a cooking perspective, if you are not feeling like an expert in cooking salmon, farm salmon actually makes it easier for you because of that.

But the pink color is, yeah,

if you care about it, you can get farm salmon that has been dyed pink.

I wonder, I'm sure it's something natural and not like FDC number 40 or whatever.

What about 46 or whatever?

Whatever they took out of Skittles in California recently.

Yeah, I always wondered about that.

Okay.

So according to a Time magazine article titled Simply, How Farmers Turn Their Salmon Pink, Pink.

Consumers will pay more than a buck a pound more if this salmon has a deeper orange-red salmon-y color because it looks more like wild salmon and so it carries that cachet, which can cost triple the price of farmed.

So they want to pay more for something that looks like wild salmon.

Now, what is the bronzer of the farmed fish world?

Okay, one way to do it is to grind up crustacean shells or algae that they would typically eat in the wild and or use astaxanthin.

It's orangish, it's safe for people, but it costs a lot.

But without it, the flesh of your farmed salmon would fall somewhere between gray and beige.

So as far as your entree goes, salmon is the new grayish.

Now, the next question is from the audio tier and from the south of the Great White North.

Hey, this is Erin Ryan from Vancouver, Canada.

I've heard that lamb-based aquaculture are generally better for the environment than sea-based aquaculture.

Does that have any merit?

Second, I'm an animal welfare scientist, and I'm wondering if you can speak to any of the animal welfare aspects of aquaculture.

Thanks.

So, first off, land-based versus sea-based.

Yeah.

And also, critter-wise, is it better?

So, a lot of land-based aquaculture is actually freshwater species, not marine species.

Okay.

But there is interest in doing aquaculture of marine marine species on land in big tanks, basically.

And they're called recirculating aquaculture systems, I think, R-A-S, RAS.

Yeah, it's just a giant tank on land.

And the environmental argument for it is once you put the water in there, it's recirculating.

Yeah.

And so you are controlling the environment.

You don't have to worry about disease as much.

Because you're controlling the environment.

You have that first batch of water and then you don't need more water.

They're very, very energy intensive.

When you pump water, water is heavy, and when you're circulating water, so the climate emissions side of these online systems is way, way higher than putting the farm in the ocean.

And so there's still debate going about which is better.

But if you can do a sustainable farm in the ocean, it's going to be generally better than doing it on land.

I also feel like, man, the land is crowded with so many other things.

Like, where are we going to put all these fish farms yeah anyway so that's the debate about on-land aquaculture animal rights is a very good question of course fish love to school that's why we call them schools of fish they're pretty happy together and the farms have worked a lot to figure out the right stocking density to keep the fish happy basically because if they're not happy they're not going to feed if they don't feed they're not healthy and then you lose money right so there's a huge incentive to make happy fish and so they stock the right number of fish in these pens to kind of keep them as happy as possible.

Now, I don't know what a fish experience is.

So maybe it's like a miss run and free, you know?

So maybe, but they got a lot of friends around them and they're swimming and they're getting fed.

So

I don't know.

It's not the same as like the chicken industrial farms where they're like terrible.

If you want to hear all about chicken farming and eggs and roosters and squirrel bandits and perhaps be convinced to build a coop in your yard, you can see our chickenology episode with Tovadanovich.

And yes, chickenology is the actual term established in the academic literature.

Some of you wrote me letters thinking it was too silly, but you can argue with ResearchGate about it.

I did not make that up.

But yeah, about animal welfare.

These fish farms for the most part, like salmon farms for sure, other fin fish, they're trying to be careful about that.

I can't say they're all perfect by any means, but they're...

probably better than a lot of other animal welfare issues, certainly for a lot of livestock.

And they have some room to swim around.

Like, it's not like SeaWorld miniature.

No, I mean, they're packed in there.

I mean, they're not going to be able to go have a quiet moment in the corner anywhere.

It's crowded.

But again, fish tend to be okay schooling now.

I don't know.

Salmon, maybe when they're in the ocean, they spread out and

five buddies can go swim by themselves for a while and then rejoin the school.

I don't really know, but they don't get that.

But I think it's probably generally okay.

But a 2021 article in the journal Science Advances titled Animal Welfare Risks of Global Aquaculture did note that, quote, many aquatic species live far more complex social and emotional lives than previously understood.

For example, it says, a 2014 review of the scientific literature on pain found that fish and decapods, such as shrimp, display hallmarks of the ability to experience pain.

Similarly, some fish have complex cognitive abilities, including tool use, individual personalities, and strong preferences about the environments in which they live.

And the paper concludes that focusing on farmed seaweed and bivalves, those are food sources with less complex needs, reduces the welfare impact on the more social and emotional species.

But more research is needed.

Now, as long as folks eat farmed salmon, how are more salmon made?

Like in the same tanks, is it a multi-generational living situation?

Are they mating in there and having little eggs and babies?

No.

No.

Okay.

They harvest them before they get to that stage.

Because when you start investing in reproduction, that's less energy put towards growing meat.

Oh, that makes sense.

Okay.

So they don't let them grow past that.

Octopuses.

Jason Lowenthal

wanted to know.

Jason said, I work in hospitality.

And it occurred to me one day as we were serving octopus.

Are there octopus farms?

There are octopus farms.

How do they not jailbreak all the time and end up putting the humans in the tanks?

That is an excellent question.

But yeah, there are a growing number of them.

They actually, you know, octopuses don't live that long.

Really?

Yeah, they only live, I think, a year or two.

So like, or maybe even less, the whole like octopus,

what was the movie?

Octopus Friend?

Octopus.

Octopus.

My octopus.

My octopus teacher.

I haven't seen it, but I understand it will rip your heart out with all its tentacles.

Yes.

And the dirty little secret behind that is it was multiple octopuses.

It wasn't one because the one they were following was dying, and then the next one would come.

I feel so betrayed.

Me too.

Yeah.

So octopus don't live that long, which means they grow quickly.

And so from a sustainability perspective, farming octopus is actually a pretty good thing.

I personally can't do it.

Yeah, I getcha.

Because they're just such fascinating, smart creatures.

I can't eat that.

I get it.

I get it.

So consider the term speciesism.

You know, dogs raised in terrible conditions for the meat industry get saved and flown to the western world to be rescued.

But we can drive past veal farms and pork plants with kind of agnatological blinders on.

And agnotology is the study of willful ignorance.

And yes, I will link that episode in the show notes.

And I am not preaching at you or anyone from a top plant-based pulpit.

I had a sandwich with turkey and bacon today.

And I know even though I've reduced my consumption, I am nowhere near eliminating it to a fully plant-based diet.

Eating meat is the worst thing about me.

I feel like I know that.

And given all these numbers, I'm much more compelled to steer further away from land-based meats.

Now, speaking of the future, history.

Era Victor, Lily, Erin Everton wanted to know.

Lily wanted to know, I'd love to hear about indigenous and ancient examples of aquaculture and if any modern systems lean on these time-tested traditions and do they look to nature for biomimicry, like indigenous aquaculture, what do you got?

There's some awesome stuff.

So

indigenous aquaculture, so shortly after the Polynesians arrived in Hawaii, maybe within 100 years, they started creating fish ponds.

And there's still many there.

Many have been filled in, but there's still many there.

Some of them are active.

I actually got to go and help restore one when I was there a couple of years ago.

But they basically, there'd been opening, a narrow opening to the ocean with like a graded wood fence there.

And the little babies would swim in, and then they'd grow up inside the pond, and then they couldn't swim out.

So they'd be trapped in there, and then they would be managed and fed in there and then harvested for different reasons.

So the Hawaiians have long been doing fish pond harvest.

So it's farming.

Up in British Columbia and southern Alaska, there is this system of kind of building a little barrier on the inner tidal to trap sediment, and then clams will grow more in there.

So they're called clam gardens.

And you can actually see them from space, even.

So they've been doing that for thousands of years.

So that's indigenous.

And there's the first known record of aquaculture is actually freshwater, like tilapia and stuff like that, from China.

And they think what happened is there was a flood.

It washed some of the river fish into ponds.

And then the people were like, hey, look, there's fish there and they can make them grow.

And so they learned how to farm fish the egyptians learned how to do this as well the ancient romans actually used to the for the wealthy they would build fish ponds underneath the wealthy people's homes how'd that smell well they no they weren't dead they were alive they could still

but smell that yeah but so the water would so same kind of thing as the hawaiian fish ponds there'd be an opening to the sea with a gate and they'd just get the fish in there and then the water would be flowing in and out oh okay so it wasn't stagnant Yeah.

Anyway, so there's really fascinating stories of both indigenous and ancient aquaculture, but it really didn't take off as a major food source until really the like 50s and 60s is when there are a lot of the 1950s and 60s when the innovation started happening.

And then it was the 80s and 90s.

It just started to rocket grow.

And actually just a few years ago, I think 2021, 2022 is when we now have more fish grown by aquaculture than is caught wild caught.

Really?

I wasn't sure what the percentage was.

Patrons Leanna Schuster, Stabby Krabby, and Curtis Dogg asked in Curtis Dog's words, my friends keep telling me that there are plenty of fish in the sea.

Is that not true?

And if you heard the pectinidology episode about scallops, my friend Miles Thompson, who's a James Beard-nominated chef, who just opened his own restaurant, it's called Baby Bistro in LA.

It's amazing.

He joined to give you tips on just how to cook scallops.

And I have a friend who's a chef and he does a lot of seafood.

And he was telling us, he's like, man, we're like the last generation that's going to get to eat a lot of these, you know?

And

where are wild populations at?

I mean, how critical are we doing with wild populations?

Depends on where you are in the world.

So the wealthier countries that have strong governments and rules and regulations, so Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand, Zealand,

a few others, they have, in the last 50 or so years, really done a good job of rebuilding a lot of the fish stocks, the wild fish stocks that had been over-harvested in the past.

And the thing that's amazing about the ocean is if you give it a chance to breathe, it will recover.

And so we have given these wild fish stocks a chance to breathe, and they've come back, a lot of them, not everyone, but a lot of them.

So wild fish, like in the northern hemisphere, for the most part, is actually doing pretty well.

The small-scale fisheries, all the hundreds and hundreds of species that are on coral reefs or in mangroves or other habitats, there's just a lot of pressure on those for people who are just trying to feed their family and make a living.

And those are not doing as well.

And there's a lot of challenge to figure out how to manage those better.

Well, a UN headline from last week kind of says it all.

Plenty of fish in the sea, not any more, say UN experts, it reads.

But the headline is a bit of a crotch punch compared to the hope in the text, which does note that while over a third of fish stocks are being overexploited, 77% of fish consumed globally still come from sustainable sources, thanks to stronger yields from well-managed fisheries.

And today, 87% of major tuna stocks are sustainably fished, and 99% of the global market comes from those stocks.

But it is regional and it's, of course, financial.

The Pacific Coast, Australia, and the Antarctic, those fish stocks are between 85 and 100% sustainable.

Now, the Northwest African coast and the Mediterranean Sea fare far worse with only 35% sustainability.

And there was this 2024 piece in the Melbourne Asia Review titled, Indo-Pacific Fish Stocks Face Multiple Challenges.

And it reports that as of 2019, 66% of fishing stock in Southeast Asia was overfished.

So that's not great.

But with adherence to regulations and improved aquaculture efficiency, wild populations can rebound more.

Jackie McCarthy, JazzerSize, Christina Simella, Magzarone, and Shayla Borker wanted to know, can you talk about certification organizations and labels, which are trusted and which are shady?

And how do you trust the reporting?

Is Monterey Bay Seafood Watch still kind of the gold standard?

standard?

Yeah, they do some great work and they put a lot of effort into trying to, you know, compile as much information and then turn it into a very simple

red, yellow, green stoplight system.

It's never perfect.

So like if you want something that you know 100% will be right, it's going to be very difficult to find that.

But as a good starting point, something like the

Monterey Seafood Watch card is a great place to start.

And we'll put a link to that on our website, and our website is linked in the show notes.

There are certification programs for wild fisheries as well as aquaculture.

The problem with them is in order to get certified, it takes a lot of money to basically do all of the documentation to prove that you're sustainable.

And so it's only the very largest operations that can afford to do that.

And so, you know, they legitimately achieve those standards.

And so they are meaningful.

They're not perfect either.

Some of the standards, like these certification things, allow you to not meet one of them as long as you meet the others.

And so you can't do it completely guilt-free, but they're pretty good.

But most of the aquaculture farms are too small to be able to pay for certification.

So what do you do?

And so I like to think of these rules of thumb around like seaweed and shellfish, you're good to go.

Okay.

You don't need to worry about it.

And on the fin fish side of stuff, it gets a little more complicated.

But I like to, again, put it into perspective of, okay, if you're worried about the environmental impact of your food choices, if you are still eating beef and pork or lamb,

you should not worry about any fish because all fish, all fish are better than those livestock animals for their environmental footprint.

So this is where pescatarianism isn't complete bullshit.

Correct.

Okay, because you know when someone's like, I'm not a vegetarian, I'm a pescatarian.

Or they say, I'm a vegetarian who eats fish.

And you're like, I hate to bring it to you, but fish are not plants.

But pescatarianism does have its merits.

Absolutely.

Okay.

I'm a pescatarian.

Okay.

There you go.

How long have you been a pescatarian?

I've been for seven or eight years.

And I did it because of environmental reasons, and I wasn't quite ready to give up fish.

And then I'm like, what am I doing?

Like, I don't even know if this is...

defensible from a scientific perspective.

So I started reading through all the literature and I'm like, there's nothing out there.

So I guess I got to do this study myself.

I spent five years with a whole team of people pulling together all the data on the environmental impact of every single food, crops, livestock, aquaculture, wild-caught fish, to compare it all.

And that's why I can now say definitively, because I did the science, that

fish are better, way better than beef.

and pork and lamb and goat, stuff like that.

Okay.

That's so helpful.

What about Yasmin Alu and first-time question asker Meg Chadzey wanted to know in Meg's words, how does farm-raised seafood stack up nutritionally against land-based agriculture?

And Yasmin wanted to know, are farmed fish the same nutritional value as wild-caught?

Yeah, so nutritionally, seafood is an amazing food, whether it's farmed or wild caught, compared to a lot of other things, crops and livestock, because it has all these micronutrients and the omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids that are super important for us nutritionally.

So when you're pregnant, they say, you know, eat fish, right?

Because it's good for you.

It's good for brain development.

It's good for all sorts of other physiological processes.

So seafood is a really good food.

Full stop.

And if your ancestors could text you, they might tell you, hell Yabra, because the anthropological consensus is that us humans, we like being near the water.

And we like fishing stuff out of it to eat.

And the 2013 paper titled Archaeological Shellfish Size and Later Human Evolution in Africa notes that shells have been traded for hundreds of thousands of years because we've been eating that stuff for hundreds of thousands of years.

And the 2007 paper, Early Human Use of Marine Resources and Pigment in South Africa during the Middle Pleistocene, concludes that shellfish may have been crucial to the survival of these early humans as they expanded their home ranges to include coastlines.

And given that about 77% of the population in Southeast Asia lives by the coast and 40% of the U.S.

population lives in coastal counties, so elite, including one in 35 Americans living in my city of Los Angeles, not that much has changed.

So compared to land-based stuff, they have...

good aspects to them as well.

But you're good to go on seafood and it's really good nutritionally.

So farmed versus wild caught, part of it is, I would say it's an access thing.

Actually, it depends on how the farmed fish is farmed.

But one of the things that's great about aquaculture is it just makes it so much more accessible.

How so?

Because you can grow more of it.

You can grow it in places that make it easier to find and buy.

Like you don't need to be next to a...

fishing port in order to access it.

I mean, I know you can ship fish all over the place, but it just helps get more fish into your diet.

And so I would say I would worry less about farmed versus wild caught in terms of the nutritional value and say just eat more fish.

Is there an issue with the carbon footprint of shipping fish from Norway or Scotland?

So, this is one of the things.

I took me a long time to get comfortable with this fact, but it's true that the whole food miles thing, like the emissions to transport food, is a tiny fraction of the carbon emissions that come from food production.

Oh.

Right?

That doesn't make sense.

But on land, like tractors when they're fuel and the emissions to make the fertilizers, like that's where most of the emissions are for crops and livestock well livestock they fart and poo and stuff so that's where most of the emissions come from livestock

so yes they are certainly a part of it but flying fish it sounds crazy but it's not actually the main concern from a climate perspective obviously if you can get a local fish, that's great.

But if you can't get it and you can get an imported fish, I would say that's good too because it's great for you nutritionally.

And if you need an episode all about eating kelp and seaweed and farming it and getting it tattooed on your body, look no further than last week's macrophycology episode with five, count of five, ocean algae experts.

We love seaweed for so many reasons.

And there's no mowing down of rainforests.

Correct.

Which are cool.

Well, except.

Except.

Oh dear.

Like I told you earlier, a lot of fish feed now has soy in it.

So this is one of the like weird things about all food systems now.

We actually feed anchovies and sardines, wild-caught fish, to chickens and pigs.

So we are feeding the ocean to our livestock.

Oh, weird.

Okay.

So if you have a concern about feeding fish to fish, you should also have a concern about feeding fish to livestock.

We do it.

It's weird.

The connection between land and sea goes the other way too.

So we feed land crops to aquaculture fish, soy Soy or even wheat and gluten, these proteins that come from crops can be substituted into these feeds.

But that means there are cases, depending on where the soy beans are being sourced from, that you could potentially be contributing to deforestation through farmed seafood because of the feed components.

At a way, way, way smaller amount than, for example, the beef industry.

Yeah, the one to eight on the beef.

Yeah.

Well, and also grazing.

The big reason a lot of the rainforest is being being cut down is to make grazing lands for beef, which is very inefficient.

Yeah.

But you mentioned something about airplanes dropping trout from planes.

News to me.

I was like, oh, I thought when you go trout fishing in a lake, that's because the lake has trout in it.

They're spitting those out from airplanes, which, number one, how are the fish surviving the impact?

But also, is that aquaculture?

Have they been growing the trout or hatching the trout?

This is such such a good question.

It kills me.

I'm so curious.

So yeah, they do drop fish.

They stock most of the lakes in the mountains.

So what is farmed and what is wild is not a black and white thing.

It's a gradient.

Actually, something like half of all

wild salmon stocks in Alaska start their life in a hatchery.

And so is that farming?

I think yes, right?

The whole idea of farming is at some point in the life stage of an organism, you are managing it.

You're cultivating it.

So yeah, I think those trout that are being dropped in the lakes are farmed, basically.

The wild salmon, many of them effectively have had part of their life stage farmed.

There's another great example in Maine, you know, the Maine lobster.

There are so many traps put on the bottom to try to catch those lobsters that are baited with sardines and anchovies and other things.

to try to get the lobsters in.

They pull them up.

There's a bunch that are too small.

They let them go.

They pull them up, a a bunch that are too small, they let them go.

Most of those are effectively being fed by the bait in these lobster traps until they get to be large enough to be harvested.

So we're kind of farming those too, even though people think of that as a wild-caught fishery, right?

Another organism that has done perhaps more skydiving than you are beavers, who were relocated via parachute into habitats in the U.S.

in decades past.

And that was discussed in our recent castorology episodes all about beavers.

Also, alongside what do beaver glands taste like, we tell you.

So, yeah, here Ben and I gossiped about air-dropped beavers for a while as Grammy tried to eat their cat food.

Yeah, so we drop a lot of things from airplanes, including fish.

What about salmon cannons?

What's up with that?

Salmon cannons?

Cannons?

Oh, cannons.

Oh, yes, they're amazing.

I've got to see them.

But a device called the salmon cannon, that's not a joke, can now help get more fish over water barriers while speeding up the process of separating the wild from the hatched.

It's basically how you move fish from one place to another.

They do it for other fish too.

I've seen them for like moving from one holding tank to another.

They'll put them through pipes or they'll shoot them through these like cannons.

It's it's phenomenal.

Like mnemonic tubes like they would have at the banks in the 80s.

Yes.

Nuts.

I meant pneumatic.

Please don't scream at me into your windshield.

Some people, She Purple, Deborah Gray, Mouse Paxton, Her Ladyship Jen, Chuck Merriam, Dana Hart, Han the Bee, and Amanda wanted to know in She Purple's words, home aquaculture possible?

Is this like if you're down with eating koi or like how what can you do there?

Sea monkeys, can you eat those?

I don't know.

Sea monkeys are tiny

to eat there.

But yeah, I mean, people definitely do backyard aquaculture.

A lot of it is actually being encouraged in developing countries as a a way for people to kind of grow their own seafood in a way that provides a really nutritious food.

So yeah, you can make a pond in your backyard and stock it with tilapia.

It's going to be almost certainly a freshwater species, so tilapia, something like that, or catfish.

And they eat almost anything.

So it's actually quite easy to grow those.

Like you can stick chickens over them.

There's ways to grow them that are quite easy and you don't need a lot of them to get more fish than you probably know what to do with.

And so, yeah, that's like fish ponds like that, for sure.

Marine species, not so much.

If you live near the coast and you are lucky enough to have coastal property, then yeah, you could stick some stakes out in the intertidal and catch seaweed, or you can hang a few mussel or oyster lines out there and grow it for sure.

You need to get permits for that because it's not your own property.

So that gets into another level.

But yeah, there's ways of growing backyard aquaculture for sure.

Some of you needed oyster questions answered.

You are patrons, Aaron Marks, Tom Boudry, Kelly Schaefer, Brian G., La Marina, Thorposaurus Jess, and Boston-based Jacqueline Church, who asked, oysters, champions of sustainable seafood, how are they farmed?

The ropes for oysters, let's say, do they glue little baby oysters or do oysters just find it and say, love this rope?

No, no, no, they stick them on there.

They do.

Yeah.

So they take the little sprat, the little babies, and they like stick, I don't know if it's glue or something like that.

They do use types of glue, but they can also give baby oyster larvae old oyster shells to attach to since they're wired to want to hang out in parties.

So the spats, the little babies, will attach to the outside bones of their ancestors.

And then they'll have their own little threads that they will bind on there as they grow.

So they have to get them going and then they can stick them out.

Okay.

I was wondering, I'm like, is it if you hang it, they will come.

But a few people, first-time question askers, Meg Chadsey and Jesse Thompson, as well as Rachel and Kathleen Regovich, wanted to know workforce.

Kathleen asked, how do you become an aquaculturist?

And Jesse said, I heard kelp farming is going to be big.

Yeah, Meg wants to know, how are you getting into it?

Yeah, well, this is like I was saying earlier, one of the things that's so exciting about aquaculture is so much of it is actually small scale, like mom and pop type stuff.

I mean, I don't think you're going to get into the mega.

salmon farms kind of thing unless you've got a lot of money.

But actually, a lot of the small scale aquaculture folks are doing oysters or mussels or kelp or seaweeds because it's quite easy to do them at small scales.

And then if you get good at it, you can start to grow.

So a lot of coastal states have basically workforce development programs around aquaculture where you can do internships.

It's really big in Maine right now and some of the southeast.

California doesn't have so much of it, but actually here in Santa Barbara, they're spinning up a whole Blue Economy training kind of program that will include aquaculture.

So

there's not a whole school for it, but there are programs scattered around the country.

So, and there's communities growing up around that that are supportive.

It's a really exciting space.

A lot of it is young people, which is great.

Yeah.

A lot of fishermen are old.

A lot of aquaculture farmers are young.

Oh.

Well, so yeah, it's a good way to meet people, too.

I mean, and it's the one job I feel like AI can't take over right now, which is good.

Naomi Jane said, I read a lot of sci-fi, and seaweed tends to be the post-meat dystopian earth choice of nutrition.

How likely is this?

And should we aim for it as a worst case scenario?

Is it like, hey, we're trending that way?

It does not have everything you need.

So no,

you're going to need something, yeah, soylent green-like in order to get the full complement of nutrients you need.

Soylent green is made out of people.

But it is great.

I mean, seaweed is fantastic.

Again, if you care about the omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids that you eat fish for, they're hyper-concentrated in seaweed because that's where it starts, right?

So you get like a super boost of it from eating seaweeds.

They just don't have a lot of the other proteins and some of the micronutrients that fish have.

And so it'll never be the only thing we can eat.

But it would be amazing if more people ate seaweed.

It's super sustainable.

It's healthy as a...

a component.

It's actually way healthier than like lettuce or a lot of our leafy greens.

And so if you want to sprinkle it on a salad or something like that or any food, it's a great way to complement your diet with super nutritious food that's environmentally sustainable.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting.

I take vitamins that have omega-3s, but they're vegan.

And I was like, how do they do that?

There you go.

It's algae.

It's algae oil.

And I was like, how'd they get these omegas in here?

There you go.

They start there.

Just a shout out to ritual, but from my guts to your world, let's ask the big question on the minds of patrons, Neil Greenstein, Meg Chadsey, the seaweed lady and first-time question asker Leo Chang, and Chris Lipford, who asked, to put it lightly, how fucked are we as a planet from climate change?

And can you save us?

Climate change,

saving the planet, because I met you as a fellow working in public outreach about climate, aquaculture, climate

benefits.

Yeah, so it is not a way to

really mitigate climate change because it's just not sequestering enough carbon.

But if you genuinely can commit to taking beef and pork out of your diet and replacing it with seafood, which is hard for a lot of people, but if you can do that, that is a huge contribution to reducing climate emissions because livestock animals is just one of the major sources of climate emissions.

So it's not going to directly fight climate change, but indirectly, if you as an individual make that choice, can help.

And so it's great for that.

Climate change is affecting where you can grow things.

So the way I actually think about it in my research is how do we develop strategies for placing aquaculture in the ocean to be resilient to climate change as it happens?

Because different species are more or less adapted to warmer or colder water and you need to be planning for that.

Yeah.

Biggest soapbox you want to climb up on with one of those bullhorns.

It's like aquaculture.

This is not your mom's aquaculture.

This is not your grandfather's aquaculture.

That is my big soapbox is like rethink aquaculture.

Like just pause and take some time to learn a little bit more about it.

It's not what, well, I don't know what you think it is, but it was not what I thought it was.

And I feel like I've just transformed my whole approach to my diet, to my science.

to my lifestyle based on learning more about what it is now compared to what it used to be.

It's a completely different thing.

It's not perfect.

There are some bad actors out there.

But in general, it's a really great solution to our food, our nutrition, and our planet.

Again, if you just can't go plant-based or you're looking to transition to a more plant-based eating style, I'm not the boss of your mouth.

I'm just here to provide information.

Has your doctor weighed in and been like, hey, since you cut out boof and pork, you're looking for your lip.

It's looking pretty good.

Well, this is a testimony on the healthcare system.

It's so hard for me to get my annual physical.

It It drives me crazy.

But when I shifted to pescatarianism, like within a month, I lost five or seven pounds.

Oh, yeah.

So, yeah.

I imagine public-facing stuff is difficult to convince people that things are changing in this realm.

What is the hardest part of studying aquaculture?

I think

mostly it's just this pervasive sense, both in the public and in the scientific community that I work with, that it's like not a good thing.

It's changing for sure, but it's a slow change.

And so, yeah, but I'm happy to stand on my soapbox with my bullhorn.

That's my like the thing that I still kind of swim upstream against is

rim shot.

See if I can come up with some other ones.

Whole can of worms.

Yeah.

It's a constant battle, but I'm going to fight it.

Favorite thing about what?

Not this interview, but your favorite thing about aquaculture.

It's like sitting here with you.

It's great.

You're like when your dog comes up and interrupts and tries to scratch my antique leather chair.

So it's pretty cool.

Favorite thing about aquaculture working in it.

Favorite thing about aquaculture, I think, is the diversity of the whole practice.

I mean, I think you see this in small-scale agriculture farming as well.

There's just so many.

individual farms and crops that people are growing and ways they're doing it and individuals and people behind that.

And it's the same with aquaculture.

Like I said, there's hundreds, if not thousands, of species that are being grown, and every farmer is doing something different.

And just learning about all that and seeing it and thinking about the potential of it for changing the way we exist with our planet is exciting.

This has been super eye-opening.

And maybe we'll get some oysters after this.

One of my favorite foods some listeners know about this is canned oysters, canned smoked oysters, which are, I have to eat them when Jarrett is out of town or not coming home for a while, and then I have to make sure to like rinse the sink out because he finds them vile.

And this is a man who could subsist on like a hot dog casserole if he had to.

But yeah, smoked oysters, they're okay.

Yeah, absolutely.

Good for you, good for the planet.

Go for it.

They're my favorite hobo food.

They're so good.

Thank you for doing this.

Oh, thanks for coming up.

You're the best.

So ask aquatically minded people some foggy-brained questions because you never know unless you question.

And Belle Halfern, thank you so much for being on ologies and making us think more deeply about how we're fueling ourselves.

Dr.

Halfern's lab is linked in the show notes, as is the Charity of the Week.

We have a ton of links and research on our show page at alleyward.com/slash ologies/slash aquaculture ecology, which is linked in the show notes too.

We are at ologies on Blue Sky and Instagram, and I'm at Alley Ward with one L on both.

We have shorter, kid-friendly, and G-rated episodes called Smologies, and those are linked in the show notes.

Or you can subscribe for free wherever you get podcasts to Smologies.

Ology's Merch is available at ologiesmerch.com.

Erin Talbert admins our Olagies podcast Facebook group.

Aveline Malik makes our professional transcripts.

Kelly R.

Dwyer does the website.

Noelle Dilworth is our scheduling producer and had to reschedule a donkey expert for me three times this week.

Thank you for that.

I love her.

Susan Hale is our magnificent managing director.

And the big fish in our small pond are editors Dick Chafee and Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio.

We are lucky to have all those folks.

Nick Thorburn made the professional theme music.

And if you stick around until the end of the episode, I tell you a secret.

I burden you with something about my life.

One secret is that this episode has made me eat less meat and more veggies.

So thank you, Ben.

Also, I'm on a road trip with your pod mother.

What do we say?

Don't worry about it.

And our daughter, Gremlin.

We're going from Portland back to LA.

And I was writing and researching this while in the car, because we've been in the car for like 30 hours.

And I had some anti-nausea pills.

They're called Zofron left over from a hysterectomy I had last year.

And if I

could bear children, I would name them all Zofran.

It works so well.

But also we are driving through the Redwood National Forest.

Let me tell you, the windiest roads on a cliff's edge for hours.

They're honestly the, with no cell signal, the world's worst place to telecommute.

And here we are, we're like, maybe I could work while we road trip.

We picked quite a doozy, but here we are.

We did it.

It's 11 p.m.

on a Tuesday night.

This episode is supposed to go up in an hour.

Look at me.

I'm still recording it.

Also, about an hour ago, the news said that maybe the U.S.

is about to go to war with Iran.

So,

you know what, my friends?

Y'all are my family.

I'm having a marg.

I'm finishing up while I'm having a margarita.

And I'm urging you, text your crush.

Who gives a fuck?

Cut the banks.

Take the scenic route home.

Wear those fancy shoes.

You don't want to scuff.

Go swimming without a bikini wax.

We're all going to die.

We're all going to be so dead.

Maybe soon, maybe later.

And you might as well just enjoy the opportunities that you have at your literal feet.

So be good to each other.

If you go to the critters.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Pachodermatology, homiology, cryptozoology, litology, nanotechnology, meteorology, old pharmacology, mapology, seriology, selenology.

The world is your oyster and I your concierge.