Aquaculture (a.k.a. fish farming) involves fish or shellfish that is taken from cultured populations rather than form the wild. Sustainable Sushi uses the methods developed by the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program to appraise these operations.
The methodology is based on the analysis of five criteria:
1) Use of marine resources: What kind of drain is the farm on our natural resources? Many fish farms use wild fish as food for their farmed product. How many pounds of fish go into the farm to get one pound of salable fish out? Is the food fish drawn from sustainable sources? Are endangered species being used as food?
2) Risk of escaped fish to wild stocks: Fish farms are always going to have some level of escapes. What is the likelihood that this could be a problem? Does the same species already exist in the waters around the farm? Could the fish thrive in the local area, and establish a population? Is there the potential for cross-breeding?
3) Risk of disease and parasite transfer to wild stocks: Is the farm acting as a disease or parasite incubator? Could these pathogens and parasites potentially transfer to local wild populations? How is the farm controlling the potential disease problems?
4) Risk of pollution and habitat effects: Many fish farms discharge effluent into the natural environmental around them. Is this being mitigated at all? What are the chemicals and particulates that are being discharged? Is they having a deleterious effect on the local environment? How is the farm effecting the environment as a whole?
5) Management effectiveness: Some farms are very well-managed, while others are slipshod operations that pose a severe threat to environment. This criterion examines the strength of the management protocols under which the farms are operating and evaluates the effectiveness of their precautionary measures.
These five criteria are appraised and averaged to generate an overall ranking.
Tags: aquaculture, farm, farming, seafood watch
Posted by Casson on Dec 24, 2008 in
Science and Rankings The Seafood Watch rankings are almost identical to the Sustainable Sushi rankings. Why is that?
The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program has been providing consumers with sound scientific advice on their seafood choices for over five years. While there are certainly limitations to using a wallet card for an information dissemination device, Seafood Watch does an excellent job of educating the public on the issues involved with many of the species integral to the American seafood complex.
I am fortunate enough to have had first-hand experience with the Seafood Watch methodology. During the formative years of the Sustainable Sushi project, I worked with the Monterey Bay Aquarium to research and draft several of the reports used by Seafood Watch on certain sushi-related species.
In general, Sustainable Sushi stands by the system used by Seafood Watch as a strong and precautionary system that honestly and accurately appraises the current seafood landscape. There are certainly issues that merit debate and room for improvement, but currently, I do not believe that a more comprehensive methodology for integrating environmentalism and science into the seafood industry exists. In fact, the great majority of the sustainability rankings used by Sustainable Sushi have been created by the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program.
For more information on the criteria used by Seafood Watch and Sustainable Sushi, please visit the posts on wild fishery rankings and aquaculture rankings.
Tags: seafood watch
Wild fisheries (a.k.a. capture fisheries) involve fish or shellfish that are taken from wild stocks rather than raised in farming systems. Sustainable Sushi uses the methods developed by the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program to appraise wild fisheries.
The methodology is based on the analysis of five criteria:
1) Life history: This criterion examines the fish itself and whether or not it is the fish inherently vulnerable to fishing pressure. Questions include: Does it reproduce quickly, or slowly? How long does it live? How long does it take for the animal to reach sexual maturity? Does it migrate in ways that result in dangerous catch patterns?
2) Stock status: It’s important to look at the current population levels of the fishery. Is it currently being overfished? Has it historically been overfished? What is the general health of the stock?
3) Bycatch: A fishery often has deleterious impacts on co-habiting animals. This criterion examines whether or not the fishery causes undue harm by killing juveniles, endangered species, or other organisms in the area.
4) Habitat and ecosystem effects: Some fisheries can impact the very ecosystems around them through the removal of biomass or the destruction of habitat. This criterion attempts to identify these effects and to appraise whether they are damaging or relatively benign in the case of each individual fishery.
5) Management: Wild fisheries deal with common resources, and thus they require management to avoid over-exploitation. It’s important to identify if there is management governing a given fishery, and whether or not this management system has been effective in protecting the stock.
These five criteria are appraised and averaged to generate an overall ranking.
Tags: capture, rankings, seafood watch, wild
