How to Breed Better Fish?

On a dark and damp cellar in the foothills of the Blue Mountains of Virginia, Bill Martin picks up a bucket of small brown granules and throws in a large concrete tank. A Nile tilapia, white, fat, come to the surface. Martin, President of Blue Ridge Aquaculture, one of the largest fish farms on top of the world, smiles at the frenzy for food.

“This is the Dory, the fish with which Jesus fed the multitudes”Says with the voice of a preacher. However, unlike Jesus, Martin does not give away their fish. A newspaper sells 5,000 pounds of live Asian Tilapia markets in North America, from Washington, to Toronto, and plans another farm on the east coast. “My model is the Poultry Industry declares, the difference is that our fish are perfectly happy”.
“How do you know they are happy?”I ask and I note that the density of tilapia in the tank is so dense as to Peter walk on them.

“They usually show their unhappiness dying -Responds Martin. I still have not lost a single fish tank”.
An industrial park in Appalachia may seem a strange place to grow a few million native Nile, but industrial-scale farms are popping up everywhere these days.

Aquaculture has increased about 14 times since 1980. In 2012, global production from silver salmon to sea cucumbers feúchos that only you might at a Chinese cook, reached over 66 million tons, exceeding production conclusively beef for the first time and rising to nearly half of all food consumed water on Earth.

It is hoped that population growth, income growth and reputation of aquatic foods like heart healthy increase demand by 35% or more just for the next 20 years. With stagnating global capture of wild fish, experts say that virtually all these new aquatic food will be grown.

“There is no way we get all the protein we need from wild fish declares Rosamond Naylor Food Policy Expert who has researched aquaculture-systems. But people are very suspicious that we create another feedlot industry in the ocean, so I want to do things right the first time”. There are good reasons to be wary.

Tilapia pens in Laguna de Bay, the largest lake in the Philippines, they are drowned out by a proliferation of algae that they helped create.

New “Blue Revolution” which has led to low shrimp, Aalmón and Tilapia vacuum packed for supermarket freezers, has brought many similar to those of agriculture land problems: habitat destruction, water pollution and fears about food safety. During the eighties of the last century, large areas of mangroves were razed to build farms currently producing a significant portion of global shrimp.

Pollution of Aquaculture-a putrid cocktail of nitrogen, phosphorus and dead-fish is now a widespread risk in Asia, where 90% of the farms are located.

Modern salmon industry, which for three decades has placed past densely packed mesh enclosures Atlantic salmon from Norway to Patagonia, has been plagued by parasites, pollution and disease. Scottish farmed salmon lost almost 10% of its fish in 2012 by a gill amebiasis; Chile, infectious salmon anemia has killed an estimated value of $ 2,000 million from 2007.

How to produce no pollution or spread disease?
Bill Martin's solution is simple: raise fish in tanks earth, not in pens in a lake or the sea. “There are sea lice, illness, escapes and deaths -comenta Martin. Compare that with a 100% controlled environment, with a possible impact on the oceans as close to zero as we can get.

In the main picture of this article Japanese scallops giants that feed on the excretions of fish in an experimental fish farm on the outskirts of Vancouver, Canada is.

SOURCE: Ngenespanol.com