Just like how cows aren’t going extinct or anything rn from overhunting, why hasn’t farming solved this issue? Surely trawl fishing ajd whatnot isn’t necessary anymore. We absolutely have the technology and capacity to farm most fish, so apart from people trying to catch particular exotic ones just to sell for the novelty, I really don’t get why this is still having such a huge effect on so many ecosystems and driving so many species to extinction, not even mention wrongfully catching sharks and stuff and destroying those species’ populations as a result.
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Actually no, We can artificially inseminate a lot of large animals. Smaller ones create a bigger problem (no pun intended)
Wound fish fees about one person. One cow feeds many more. I don’t know the math
There are actually a lot of fish that we don’t have the capacity to farm, or aren’t cost effective to farm. Part of this is due to the fact a large portion of fish we eat are migratory and high tier predators meaning they need (in some case literally) tons of food to grow to harvest weight and age, and miles upon miles of area to traverse or else they become unhealthy or subpar.
Not every fish works well to be farmed. Even then, farming takes infrastructure, and has its owns issues.
Infrastructure wise it is far more involved to farm salmon than cows. Theoretically, just some grass and wood, plus some cows and you can farm cows.
At minimum for salmon you need a large net constantly under attack from other marine life, a large amount of water, different tanks for spawning smaller salmon, filtration systems for the smaller salmon tanks, etc.
Lower food chain fish like tilapia and carp are easy. But higher food chain ocean going fish like tuna or salmon are more challenging and costly. And people like tuna and salmon.
They eat far more relative to the produced final product. Also their life cycles generally involve more open water which isn’t always easy.
Tuna is relatively new to farming and has the same issues.
Not every fish lends itself to farming, sardines reportedly don’t work well with farming but I can’t seem to find something that says why. Could be life cycle requiring certain things, disease in farming, etc. one theory is food source since they eat plankton and may migrate to certain areas and that doesn’t work contained in pens.
Oddly enough, sardines are threatened due to being caught to feed farmed fish.
Fish farms also can lead to diseases and a large amount of fish waste in one area.
Not every country follows the same regulations, and it would seem many are indifferent about the fact that species are being overfished to the brink of extinction. Also, not every fish is suitable for a farm environment.
Other countries don’t have the same laws for overfishing, they don’t want to slow down profit at the moment.
I don’t know much about fish farming technology but I have had some experience with the political side of licensed trawling and fish netting.
The main issue is that the people who make their living trawling fish are heavily invested in trawling fish. If the technology does exist to farm the fish that they usually catch, it doesn’t do them any good because they don’t own fish farms and they don’t know how to farm fish. They do own trawlers and nets and they know how to fish the seas and lakes.
When trawling becomes illegal they are left with useless trawlers and other equipment that have little or no sale value because they can no longer be used for their intended purpose.. Their business tends not to own any land upon which they might set up a farm.
So when a society switches from hunting fish to farming fish, the people who were fish hunters are rarely in a position to become the fish farmers.
Fisher-persons know this and have long ago formed commercial associations with lobby groups and they fight hard, and in my experience they fight dirty, against any legislative change that might effect their licenses.
FYI cows are farmed, not hunted. If we hunted them they probably would be extinct, just like so many other species. The farm animals on Earth weigh more than all the other wild mammals and birds combined, and that’s because we put them there.
Lack of genetic diversity….Ok so say all of the fish are from this one male and female and released into the wild at the same time. Boom, one fish gets infected with something (had no immunity) and next thing you know the entire global population has it. With natural breeding,
you get a much more diverse genetic pool, meaning one type of protozoa/virus etc doesnt wipe out the entire population.
Its like why you dont marry your sister/brother etc…as they pass there genes to there children genetic defects can show up, keep doing it and each generation gets worse.
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