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Offshore aquaculture

Offshore aquaculture uses fish cages similar to these inshore cages, except they are submerged and moved offshore into deeper water.
Lukas Manomaitis, managing director, Seafood Consulting Associates[1]

Offshore aquaculture, also known as open water aquaculture or open ocean aquaculture, is an emerging approach to mariculture (seawater aquafarming) where fish farms are positioned in deeper and less sheltered waters some distance away from the coast, where the cultivated fish stocks are exposed to more naturalistic living conditions with stronger ocean currents and more diverse nutrient flow.[2][3] Existing "offshore" developments fall mainly into the category of exposed areas rather than fully offshore. As maritime classification society DNV GL has stated, development and knowledge-building are needed in several fields for the available deeper water opportunities to be realized.[4]

One of the concerns with inshore aquaculture, which operate on more sheltered (and thus calmer) shallow waters, is that the discarded nutrients from unconsumed feeds and feces can accumulate on the farm's seafloor and damage the benthic ecosystem,[5] and sometimes contribute to algal blooms. According to proponents of offshore aquaculture, the wastes from aquafarms that have been moved offshore tend to be swept away and diluted into the open ocean. Moving aquaculture offshore also provides more ecological space where production yields can expand to meet the increasing market demands for fish. Offshore facilities also avoid many of the conflicts with other marine resource users in the more crowded inshore waters, though there can still be user conflicts offshore.

Critics are concerned about issues such as the ongoing consequences of using antibiotics and other drug pollutions, and the possibilities of cultured fish escaping and spreading disease among wild fish.[3][6]

  1. ^ ASEAN Seafood Expo 2017 Conference & Activity Programme
  2. ^ Naylor, R., and Burke, M. (2005) "Aquaculture and ocean resources: raising tigers of the sea" Archived 2010-07-16 at the Wayback Machine Annual Review of Environmental Resources, 30:185–218.
  3. ^ a b Sturrock H, Newton R, Paffrath S, Bostock J, Muir J, Young J, Immink A and Dickson M (2008) Part 2: Characterisation of emerging aquaculture systems[permanent dead link] In: Prospective Analysis of the Aquaculture Sector in the EU, European Commission, EUR 23409 EN/2. ISBN 978-92-79-09442-2. doi:10.2791/31843
  4. ^ "Offshore aquaculture – DNV GL". DNV GL. Retrieved 2018-10-17.
  5. ^ Cite error: The named reference Black2004 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  6. ^ Cite error: The named reference ten was invoked but never defined (see the help page).

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