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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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.
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