Dear Fishologists:
I read stories all the time about depleted-due-to-overfishing fish stocks (or any kind of environmental effect from too few [insert fish species here]) in the ocean, but what I don’t understand is why it wouldn’t be possible to just restore them by “farming” them for a short time (since most reproduce with each mother having hundreds/thousands of eggs) in a tank/protected area and then releasing the zillions of young fish (at whatever stage minimized the cost of feeding them and maximized their chances of survival) into the wild, to be caught (or be part of the food chain) when they get older. It just seems weird to have too-low populations of a species that has such a high single-generation reproduction rate, combined with our ability to leverage that.
I get that maybe there isn’t enough of [whatever that fish eats] in the ocean, so this wouldn’t work – but then couldn’t we do the same thing with whatever that food source is too?
Thanks,
Ignorant Five Year Old
edit: when I was actually a little kid, we had a few golden angelfish at home in a tank, and they laid eggs and bred so rapidly we tried to sell the hundreds of babies back to the fish store, until they got sick of it and told us to stop.
In: 5
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As you said we’d have to farm their food stocks too, basically replicate an insanely complex marine ecosystem that scientists still don’t comprehend. Not to mention ocean temperature and acidity levels which keep rising.
Things can get very complex.
For example, adult cod eat capelin and other fish that in turn eat cod eggs and hatchlings. With the total collapse of Atlantic cod, the lack of predators for capelin and herring (aside from us) may well mean a new stable ecosystem where cod populations never recover.
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