Product Code Database
Aquaculture (less commonly spelled aquiculture), also known as aquafarming, is the controlled cultivation ("farming") of such as fish, , , algae and other organisms of value such as (e.g. Nelumbo nucifera). Aquaculture involves cultivating freshwater, brackish water, and saltwater populations under controlled or semi-natural conditions and can be contrasted with commercial fishing, which is the harvesting of wild fish. Aquaculture is also a practice used for restoring and rehabilitating marine and freshwater ecosystems. Mariculture, commonly known as marine farming, is aquaculture in seawater habitats and lagoons, as opposed to freshwater aquaculture. Pisciculture is a type of aquaculture that consists of fish farming to obtain fish products as food.
Aquaculture can also be defined as the breeding, growing, and harvesting of fish and other aquatic plants, also known as farming in water. It is an environmental source of food and commercial products that help to improve healthier habitats and are used to reconstruct the population of endangered aquatic species. Technology has increased the growth of fish in coastal marine waters and open oceans due to the increased demand for seafood.
Aquaculture can be conducted in completely artificial facilities built on land (onshore aquaculture), as in the case of fish tank, fish pond, aquaponics or raceways, where the living conditions rely on human control such as water quality (oxygen), feed or temperature. Alternatively, they can be conducted on well-sheltered shallow waters littoral of a body of water (inshore aquaculture), where the cultivated species are subjected to relatively more naturalistic environments; or on fenced/enclosed sections of open ocean away from the shore (offshore aquaculture), where the species are either cultured in cages, racks or bags and are exposed to more diverse natural conditions such as water currents (such as ), diel vertical migration and .
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), aquaculture "is understood to mean the farming of aquatic organisms including fish, molluscs, crustaceans and aquatic plants. Farming implies some form of intervention in the fish hatchery to enhance production, such as regular fish stocking, fish feed, protection from predators, etc. Farming also implies individual or corporate ownership of the stock being cultivated." Global Aquaculture Production Fishery Statistical Collections, FAO, Rome. Retrieved 2 October 2011. The reported output from global aquaculture operations in 2019 was over 120 million tonnes valued at US$274 billion, by 2022, it had risen to 130.9 million tonnes, valued at USD 312.8 billion.FAO FIGIS Database (2022) Global Aquaculture Production 1950–2019 . Retrieved 2 February 2022 However, there are issues with the reliability of the reported figures. Further, in current aquaculture practice, products from several kilograms of wild fish are used to produce one kilogram of a piscivorous fish like salmon. Plant and insect-based feeds are also being developed to help reduce wild fish being used for aquaculture feed.
Particular kinds of aquaculture include fish farming, shrimp farming, oyster farming, mariculture, pisciculture, algaculture (such as seaweed farming), and the cultivation of ornamental fish. Particular methods include aquaponics and integrated multi-trophic aquaculture, both of which integrate fish farming and aquatic plant farming. The FAO describes aquaculture as one of the industries most directly affected by climate change and its impacts. Some forms of aquaculture have negative impacts on the environment, such as through nutrient pollution or disease transfer to wild populations.
About 430 (97%) of the species cultured were domesticated during the 20th and 21st centuries, of which an estimated 106 came in the decade to 2007. Given the long-term importance of agriculture, to date, only 0.08% of known land plant species and 0.0002% of known land animal species have been domesticated, compared with 0.17% of known marine plant species and 0.13% of known marine animal species. Domestication typically involves about a decade of scientific research. Domesticating aquatic species involves fewer risks to humans than do land animals, which took a large toll in human lives. Most major human diseases originated in domesticated animals, (2025). 9780393061314, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.. ISBN 9780393061314 including diseases such as smallpox and diphtheria, that like most infectious diseases, move to humans from animals. No human of comparable virulence have yet emerged from marine species.
Biological control methods to manage parasites are already being used, such as cleaner fish (e.g. lumpsuckers and wrasse) to control sea lice populations in salmon farming. Models are being used to help with spatial planning and siting of fish farms in order to minimize impact. The decline in wild fish stocks has increased the demand for farmed fish. However, finding alternative sources of protein and oil for fish feed is necessary so the aquaculture industry can grow sustainably; otherwise, it represents a great risk for the over-exploitation of forage fish.
Aquaculture production now exceeds capture fishery production and together the relative GDP contribution has ranged from 0.01 to 10%.Junning Cai (2025). 9789251312803, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. ISBN 9789251312803 Singling out aquaculture's relative contribution to GDP, however, is not easily derived due to lack of data.Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2025). 9789251326923, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. ISBN 9789251326923
Another recent issue following the banning in 2008 of organotins by the International Maritime Organization is the need to find environmentally friendly, but still effective, compounds with antifouling effects.
Many new natural compounds are discovered every year, but producing them on a large enough scale for commercial purposes is almost impossible.
It is highly probable that future developments in this field will rely on microorganisms, but greater funding and further research is needed to overcome the lack of knowledge in this field.
In 2016, aquaculture was the source of 96.5 percent by volume of the total 31.2 million tonnes of wild-collected and cultivated aquatic plants combined. Global production of farmed aquatic plants, overwhelmingly dominated by seaweeds, grew in output volume from 13.5 million tonnes in 1995 to just over 30 million tonnes in 2016.
In the Mediterranean, young bluefin tuna are netted at sea and towed slowly towards the shore. They are then interned in offshore pens (sometimes made from floating HDPE pipe) where they are further grown for the market. In 2009, researchers in Australia managed for the first time to coax southern bluefin tuna to breed in landlocked tanks. Southern bluefin tuna are also caught in the wild and fattened in grow-out sea cages in southern Spencer Gulf, South Australia.
A similar process is used in the salmon-farming section of this industry; juveniles are taken from hatcheries and a variety of methods are used to aid them in their maturation. For example, as stated above, some of the most important fish species in the industry, salmon, can be grown using a cage system. This is done by having netted cages, preferably in open water that has a strong flow, and feeding the salmon a special food mixture that aids their growth. This process allows for year-round growth of the fish, thus a higher harvest during the correct seasons. An additional method, known sometimes as sea ranching, has also been used within the industry. Sea ranching involves raising fish in a hatchery for a brief time and then releasing them into marine waters for further development, whereupon the fish are recaptured when they have matured. (1983). 9780870554278, AVI Publishing. ISBN 9780870554278
Shrimp farming has changed from its traditional, small-scale form in Southeast Asia into a global industry. Technological advances have led to ever higher densities per unit area, and broodstock is shipped worldwide. Virtually all farmed shrimp are (i.e., shrimp of the family Penaeidae), and just two species of shrimp, the Whiteleg shrimp and the giant tiger prawn, account for about 80% of all farmed shrimp. These industrial are very susceptible to disease, which has decimated shrimp populations across entire regions. Increasing ecology problems, repeated disease outbreaks, and pressure and criticism from both nongovernmental organizations and consumer countries led to changes in the industry in the late 1990s and generally stronger regulations. In 1999, governments, industry representatives, and environmental organizations initiated a program aimed at developing and promoting more sustainable farming practices through the Seafood Watch program.
Freshwater prawn farming shares many characteristics with, including many problems with, marine shrimp farming. Unique problems are introduced by the developmental lifecycle of the main species, the giant river prawn.New, M. B.: Farming Freshwater Prawns; FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 428, 2002. .
The global annual production of freshwater prawns (excluding crayfish and ) in 2007 was about 460,000 , exceeding 1.86 billion dollars. Additionally, China produced about 370,000 tonnes of Chinese river crab.Data extracted from the FAO Fisheries Global Aquaculture Production Database for freshwater crustaceans. The most recent data are from 2003 and sometimes contain estimates. Retrieved June 28, 2005.
In addition astaciculture is the freshwater farming of crayfish (mostly in the US, Australia, and Europe).
Depending on the species and local conditions, bivalve molluscs are either grown on the beach, on longlines, or suspended from rafts and harvested by hand or by dredging. In May 2017 a Belgian consortium installed the first of two trial mussel farms on a wind farm in the North Sea.
Abalone farming began in the late 1950s and early 1960s in Japan and China. Since the mid-1990s, this industry has become increasingly successful. Overfishing and poaching have reduced wild populations to the extent that farmed abalone now supplies most abalone meat. Sustainably farmed molluscs can be certified by Seafood Watch and other organizations, including the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). WWF initiated the "Aquaculture Dialogues" in 2004 to develop measurable and performance-based standards for responsibly farmed seafood. In 2009, WWF co-founded the Aquaculture Stewardship Council with the Dutch Sustainable Trade Initiative to manage the global standards and certification programs.
After trials in 2012, a commercial "sea ranch" was set up in Flinders Bay, Western Australia, to raise abalone. The ranch is based on an artificial reef made up of 5000 () separate concrete units called abitats (abalone habitats). The 900 kg abitats can host 400 abalone each. The reef is seeded with young abalone from an onshore hatchery. The abalone feed on seaweed that has grown naturally on the habitats, with the ecosystem enrichment of the bay also resulting in growing numbers of dhufish, pink snapper, wrasse, and Samson fish, among other species.
Brad Adams, from the company, has emphasised the similarity to wild abalone and the difference from shore-based aquaculture. "We're not aquaculture, we're ranching, because once they're in the water they look after themselves."
Commercially harvested echinoderms include and . In China, sea cucumbers are farmed in artificial ponds as large as .
In 2022 most aquaculture workers were in Asia (95%), followed by Africa (3%) and Latin America and the Caribbean (2%).
The contribution of aquaculture to the global production of capture fisheries and aquaculture combined has risen continuously, reaching 46.8 percent in 2016, up from 25.7 percent in 2000. With 5.8 percent annual growth rate during the period 2001–2016, aquaculture continues to grow faster than other major food production sectors, but it no longer has the high annual growth rates experienced in the 1980s and 1990s.
In 2012, the total world production of fisheries was 158 million , of which aquaculture contributed 66.6 million tonnes, about 42%. FAO (2014) The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2014 (SOFIA) The growth rate of worldwide aquaculture has been sustained and rapid, averaging about 8% per year for over 30 years, while the take from wild fisheries has been essentially flat for the last decade. The aquaculture market reached $86 billion $86 thousand million in 2009.
Aquaculture is an especially important economic activity in China. Between 1980 and 1997, the Chinese Bureau of Fisheries reports, aquaculture harvests grew at an annual rate of 16.7%, jumping from 1.9 million tonnes to nearly 23 million tonnes. In 2005, China accounted for 70% of world production. Aquaculture is also currently one of the fastest-growing areas of food production in the U.S.
About 90% of all U.S. shrimp consumption is farmed and imported. In recent years, salmon aquaculture has become a major export in southern Chile, especially in Puerto Montt, Chile's fastest-growing city.
A United Nations report titled The State of the World Fisheries and Aquaculture released in May 2014 maintained fisheries and aquaculture support the livelihoods of some 60 million people in Asia and Africa. FAO estimates that in 2016, overall, women accounted for nearly 14 percent of all people directly engaged in the fisheries and aquaculture primary sector.
In 2021, global fish production reached 182 million tonnes, with approximately equal amounts coming from capture (91.2 million tonnes) and aquaculture (90.9 million tonnes). Aquaculture has experienced rapid growth in recent decades, increasing almost sevenfold from 1990 to 2021.
In 2001, scientists Reg Watson and Daniel Pauly expressed concerns that China was over reporting its catch from wild fisheries in the 1990s. They said that made it appear that the global catch since 1988 was increasing annually by 300,000 tonnes, whereas it was really shrinking annually by 350,000 tonnes. Watson and Pauly suggested this may have been related to Chinese policies where state entities that monitored the economy were also tasked with increasing output. Also, until more recently, the promotion of Chinese officials was based on production increases from their own areas.
China disputed this claim. The official Xinhua News Agency quoted Yang Jian, director general of the Agriculture Ministry's Bureau of Fisheries, as saying that China's figures were "basically correct". China disputes claim it over reports fish catch Associated Press, 17 December 2002. However, the FAO accepted there were issues with the reliability of China's statistical returns, and for a period treated data from China, including the aquaculture data, apart from the rest of the world.
Mariculture may consist of raising the organisms on or in artificial enclosures such as in floating netted enclosures for salmon, and on racks or in floating cages for oysters. In the case of enclosed salmon, they are fed by the operators; oysters on racks filter feed on naturally available food. Abalone have been farmed on an artificial reef consuming seaweed which grows naturally on the reef units.
"Multi-trophic" refers to the incorporation of species from different trophic level or nutritional levels in the same system.Chopin T. 2006. Integrated multi-trophic aquaculture. What it is, and why you should care ... and don't confuse it with polyculture. Northern Aquaculture, Vol. 12, No. 4, July/August 2006, pg. 4. This is one potential distinction from the age-old practice of aquatic polyculture, which could simply be the co-culture of different fish species from the same trophic level. In this case, these organisms may all share the same biological and chemical processes, with few synergy benefits, which could potentially lead to significant shifts in the ecosystem. Some traditional polyculture systems may, in fact, incorporate a greater diversity of species, occupying several Ecological niche, as extensive cultures (low intensity, low management) within the same pond. A working IMTA system can result in greater total production based on mutual benefits to the co-cultured species and improved ecosystem health, even if the production of individual species is lower than in a monoculture over a short-term period.
Sometimes the term "integrated aquaculture" is used to describe the integration of monocultures through water transfer. For all intents and purposes, however, the terms "IMTA" and "integrated aquaculture" differ only in their degree of descriptiveness. Aquaponics, fractionated aquaculture, integrated agriculture-aquaculture systems, integrated peri-urban-aquaculture systems, and integrated fisheries-aquaculture systems are other variations of the IMTA concept.
Recently, copper alloys have become important netting materials in aquaculture because they are antimicrobial (i.e., they destroy bacteria, viruses, fungi, algae, and other microbes) and they therefore prevent biofouling (i.e., the undesirable accumulation, adhesion, and growth of microorganisms, plants, algae, tubeworms, barnacles, mollusks, and other organisms). By inhibiting microbial growth, copper alloy aquaculture cages avoid costly net changes that are necessary with other materials. The resistance of organism growth on copper alloy nets also provides a cleaner and healthier environment for farmed fish to grow and thrive.
Biofloc technology is also used to simultaneously improve water quality and generate bacterial biomass as food for the cultured animals.
Fish waste is organic and composed of nutrients necessary in all components of aquatic food webs. In-ocean aquaculture often produces much higher than normal fish waste concentrations. The waste collects on the ocean bottom, damaging or eliminating bottom-dwelling life. Waste can also decrease dissolved oxygen levels in the water column, putting further pressure on wild animals. An alternative model to food being added to the ecosystem, is the installation of artificial reef structures to increase the habitat niches available, without the need to add any more than ambient feed and nutrient. This has been used in the "ranching" of abalone in Western Australia.
Farming of carnivorous species like salmon and shrimp leads to a high demand for forage fish to match the nutrition they get in the wild. Fish do not actually produce omega-3 fatty acids, but instead accumulate them from either consuming microalgae that produce these fatty acids, as is the case with forage fish like herring and , or, as is the case with fatty predatory fish, like salmon, by eating prey fish that have accumulated omega-3 fatty acids from microalgae. To satisfy this requirement, more than 50 percent of the world fish oil production is fed to farmed salmon.
Farmed salmon consume more wild fish than they generate as a final product, although the efficiency of production is improving. To produce one kilograms of farmed salmon, products from several kilograms of wild fish are fed to them – this can be described as the "fish-in-fish-out" (FIFO) ratio. In 1995, salmon had a FIFO ratio of 7.5 (meaning 7.5 kilograms of wild fish feed were required to produce one kilogram of salmon); by 2006 the ratio had fallen to 4.9. Additionally, a growing share of fish oil and fishmeal come from residues (byproducts of fish processing), rather than dedicated whole fish. In 2012, 34 percent of fish oil and 28 percent of fishmeal came from residues. However, fishmeal and oil from residues instead of whole fish have a different composition with more ash and less protein, which may limit its potential use for aquaculture.
As the salmon farming industry expands, it requires more wild forage fish for feed, at a time when seventy-five percent of the world's monitored fisheries are already near to or have exceeded their maximum sustainable yield.Seafood Choices Alliance (2005) The industrial-scale extraction of wild forage fish for salmon farming then impacts the survivability of the wild predator fish who rely on them for food. An important step in reducing the impact of aquaculture on wild fish is shifting carnivorous species to plant-based feeds. Salmon feeds, for example, have gone from containing only fishmeal and oil to containing 40 percent plant protein. The USDA has also experimented with using grain-based feeds for farmed trout. When properly formulated (and often mixed with fishmeal or oil), plant-based feeds can provide proper nutrition and similar growth rates in carnivorous farmed fish.NOAA/USDA: The Future of Aquafeeds (2011)
Another impact aquaculture production can have on wild fish is the risk of fish escaping from coastal pens, where they can interbreed with their wild counterparts, diluting wild genetic stocks. Escaped fish can become invasive species, out-competing native species. " Aquaculture's growth continuing: improved management techniques can reduce environmental effects of the practice. (UPDATE)." Resource: Engineering & Technology for a Sustainable World 16.5 (2009): 20–22. Gale Expanded Academic ASAP. Web. 1 October 2009.
However, the controversial issue in aquaculture is whether fish and farmed marine invertebrates are actually Sentience, or have the perception and awareness to experience suffering. Although no evidence of this has been found in marine invertebrates, recent studies conclude that fish do have the necessary receptors (nociceptors) to sense noxious stimuli and so are likely to experience states of pain, fear and stress. Consequently, welfare in aquaculture is directed at vertebrates, finfish in particular.
Optimal stocking density is often defined by the carrying capacity of the stocked environment and the amount of individual space needed by the fish, which is very species specific. Although behavioural interactions such as shoaling may mean that high stocking densities are beneficial to some species, in many cultured species high stocking densities may be of concern. Crowding can constrain normal swimming behaviour, as well as increase aggressive and competitive behaviours such as cannibalism, feed competition, territoriality and dominance/subordination hierarchies. This potentially increases the risk of tissue damage due to abrasion from fish-to-fish contact or fish-to-cage contact. Fish can suffer reductions in food intake and food conversion efficiency. In addition, high stocking densities can result in water flow being insufficient, creating inadequate oxygen supply and waste product removal. Dissolved oxygen is essential for fish respiration and concentrations below critical levels can induce stress and even lead to asphyxiation. Ammonia, a nitrogen excretion product, is highly toxic to fish at accumulated levels, particularly when oxygen concentrations are low.
Many of these interactions and effects cause stress in the fish, which can be a major factor in facilitating fish disease. For many parasites, infestation depends on the host's degree of mobility, the density of the host population and vulnerability of the host's defence system. Sea lice are the primary parasitic problem for finfish in aquaculture, high numbers causing widespread skin erosion and haemorrhaging, gill congestion, and increased mucus production. There are also a number of prominent viral and bacterial that can have severe effects on internal organs and nervous systems.
Not surprisingly disease and parasitism can have a major effect on fish welfare and it is important for farmers not only to manage infected stock but also to apply disease prevention measures. However, prevention methods, such as vaccination, can also induce stress because of the extra handling and injection. Other methods include adding antibiotics to feed, adding chemicals into water for treatment baths and biological control, such as using cleaner fish to remove lice from farmed salmon.
Many steps are involved in transport, including capture, food deprivation to reduce faecal contamination of transport water, transfer to transport vehicle via nets or pumps, plus transport and transfer to the delivery location. During transport water needs to be maintained to a high quality, with regulated temperature, sufficient oxygen and minimal waste products. In some cases anaesthetics may be used in small doses to calm fish before transport.
Aquaculture is sometimes part of an environmental rehabilitation program or as an aid in conserving endangered species.Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (1997). 9789251039717, Food & Agriculture Org.. . ISBN 9789251039717
In 2016, mass fish kill events impacted salmon farmers along Chile's coast and the wider ecology. Increases in aquaculture production and its associated effluent were considered to be possible contributing factors to fish and molluscan mortality.
Sea cage aquaculture is responsible for nutrient enrichment of the waters in which they are established. This results from fish wastes and uneaten feed inputs. Elements of most concern are nitrogen and phosphorus which can promote algal growth, including harmful algal blooms which can be toxic to fish. Flushing times, current speeds, distance from the shore and water depth are important considerations when locating sea cages in order to minimize the impacts of nutrient enrichment on coastal ecosystems.
The extent of the effects of pollution from sea-cage aquaculture varies depending on where the cages are located, which species are kept, how densely cages are stocked and what the fish are fed. Important species-specific variables include the species' food conversion ratio (FCR) and nitrogen retention.
In the 1990s, disease wiped out China's farmed Farrer's scallop and white shrimp and required their replacement by other species." An Overview of China's Aquaculture", page 6. Netherlands Business Support Office (Dalian), 2010.
The alternative to vaccines would be antibiotics and chemotherapy, which are more expensive and with bigger drawbacks. DNA-vaccines have become the most cost-efficient method of preventing infectious diseases. This bodes well for DNA-vaccines becoming the new standard both in fish vaccines, and in general vaccines.
Aquaculture in an area can provide for crucial ecological functions for the inhabitants. Shellfish beds or cages can provide habitat structure. This structure can be used as shelter by invertebrates, small fish or to potentially increase their abundance and maintain biodiversity. Increased shelter raises stocks of prey fish and small crustaceans by increasing recruitment opportunities in turn providing more prey for higher trophic levels. One study estimated that 10 square meters of oyster reef could enhance an ecosystem's biomass by 2.57 kg Herbivore shellfish will also be preyed on. This moves energy directly from to higher potentially skipping out on multiple energetically costly trophic jumps which would increase biomass in the ecosystem.
Seaweed farming is a carbon negative crop, with a high potential for climate change mitigation. The IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate recommends "further research attention" as a mitigation tactic. Regenerative ocean farming is a polyculture farming system that grows a mix of seaweeds and shellfish while sequestering carbon, decreasing nitrogen in the water and increasing oxygen, helping to regenerate and restore local habitat like reef ecosystems.
Apart from fish and shrimp, some aquaculture undertakings, such as seaweed and filter-feeding bivalve mollusks like , , and , are relatively benign and even environmentally restorative. Filter-feeders filter pollutants as well as nutrients from the water, improving water quality. Seaweeds extract nutrients such as inorganic nitrogen and phosphorus directly from the water, and filter-feeding can extract nutrients as they feed on particulates, such as phytoplankton and detritus.
Some profitable aquaculture cooperatives promote sustainable practices. New methods lessen the risk of biological and chemical pollution through minimizing fish stress, fallowing netpens, and applying integrated pest management. are being used more and more to reduce antibiotic use for disease control.
Onshore recirculating aquaculture systems, facilities using polyculture techniques, and properly sited facilities (for example, offshore areas with strong currents) are examples of ways to manage negative environmental effects.
Recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS) recycle water by circulating it through filters to remove fish waste and food and then recirculating it back into the tanks. This saves water and the waste gathered can be used in compost or, in some cases, could even be treated and used on land. While RAS was developed with freshwater fish in mind, scientists associated with the Agricultural Research Service have found a way to rear saltwater fish using RAS in low-salinity waters. Although saltwater fish are raised in off-shore cages or caught with nets in water that typically has a salinity of 35 parts per thousand (ppt), scientists were able to produce healthy pompano, a saltwater fish, in tanks with a salinity of only 5 ppt. Commercializing low-salinity RAS are predicted to have positive environmental and economical effects. Unwanted nutrients from the fish food would not be added to the ocean and the risk of transmitting diseases between wild and farm-raised fish would greatly be reduced. The price of expensive saltwater fish, such as the pompano and cobia used in the experiments, would be reduced. However, before any of this can be done researchers must study every aspect of the fish's lifecycle, including the amount of ammonia and nitrate the fish will tolerate in the water, what to feed the fish during each stage of its lifecycle, the stocking rate that will produce the healthiest fish, etc.
Some 16 countries now use geothermal energy for aquaculture, including China, Israel, and the United States. (2025). 9780393328318, W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 9780393328318 In California, for example, 15 fish farms produce tilapia, bass, and catfish with warm water from underground. This warmer water enables fish to grow all year round and mature more quickly. Collectively these California farms produce 4.5 million kilograms of fish each year.
In the United States, land-based and nearshore aquaculture is regulated at the federal and state levels; however, no national laws govern offshore aquaculture in U.S. exclusive economic zone waters. In June 2011, the Department of Commerce and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released national aquaculture policies to address this issue and "to meet the growing demand for healthy seafood, to create jobs in coastal communities, and restore vital ecosystems." Large aquaculture facilities (i.e. those producing per year) which discharge wastewater are required to obtain permits pursuant to the Clean Water Act.
Facilities that produce at least of fish, molluscs or crustaceans a year are subject to specific national discharge standards. Other permitted facilities are subject to effluent limitations that are developed on a case-by-case basis.
Oral tradition in China tells of the culture of the common carp, Cyprinus carpio, as long ago as 2000–2100 BCE (around 4,000 years before present), but the earliest significant evidence lies in the literature, in the earliest monograph on fish culture called The Classic of Fish Culture, by Fan Li, written around 475 BCE ( BP). Another ancient Chinese guide to aquaculture , wriiten by Yang Yu Jing around 460 BCE, shows that carp farming was becoming more sophisticated. The Jiahu site in China has circumstantial archeological evidence as possibly the oldest aquaculture locations, dating from 6200BCE (about 8,200 years BP), but this is speculative. When the waters subsided after river floods, some fish, mainly carp, were trapped in lakes. Early aquaculturists fed their brood using nymphs and silkworm faeces, and ate them.
Ancient Egyptians might have farmed fish (especially gilt-head bream) from Lake Bardawil about 1,500 BCE (about 3,500 BP), and they traded them with Canaan.
Gim cultivation is the oldest aquaculture in Korea. Early cultivation methods used bamboo or oak sticks; newer methods utilizing nets replaced them in the 19th century. Floating rafts have been used for mass production since the 1920s.
Japanese people cultivated seaweed by providing bamboo poles and, later, nets and oyster shells to serve as anchoring-surfaces for .
Ancient Rome bred fish in ponds and farmed oysters in coastal lagoons before 100 common era.
In Middle Ages, early Christian monastery adopted Roman aquacultural practices.
Jhingran, V.G., Introduction to aquaculture. 1987, United Nations Development Programme, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Nigerian Institute for Oceanography and Marine Research. Aquaculture spread because people away from coasts and big rivers were otherwise dependant on fish which required salting in order to be preserved. Fish was an important food source in medieval Europe, when in average 150 days per year were days of fasting and abstinence, and meat was prohibited. Improvements in transportation during the 19th century made fresh fish easily available and inexpensive, even in inland areas, rendering aquaculture less popular. The 15th-century fishponds of the Trebon Basin in the present-day Czech Republic are maintained as a tentative UNESCO World Heritage Site.
constructed oceanic fish ponds. A remarkable example is the "Menehune" fishpond dating from at least 1,000 years ago, at Alekoko. Legend records its construction by the mythical Menehune dwarf-people.
In the first half of the 18th century, German Stephan Ludwig Jacobi experimented with external fertilization of brown trout and salmon. He wrote an article " Von der künstlichen Erzeugung der Forellen und Lachse" ( On the Artificial Production of Trout and Salmon) summarizing his findings, and earning him a reputation as the founder of artificial fish-rearing. By the latter decades of the 18th century, oyster-farming had begun in estuaries along the Atlantic Coast of North America.
The word "aquaculture" appeared in an 1855 newspaper article in reference to the harvesting of ice. It also appeared in descriptions of the terrestrial agricultural practise of subirrigation in the late-19th century before becoming associated primarily with the cultivation of aquatic plant- and animal-species. (The Oxford English Dictionary records the common modern usage of "aquaculture" from 1887;
In 1859, Stephen Ainsworth of West Bloomfield, New York, began experiments with brook trout. By 1864, Seth Green had established a commercial fish-hatching operation at Caledonia Springs, near Rochester, New York. By 1866, with the involvement of W. W. Fletcher of Concord, Massachusetts, artificial Fish hatchery operated both in both Canada and in the United States.Milner, James W. (1874). "The Progress of Fish-culture in the United States". United States Commission of Fish and Fisheries Report of the Commissioner for 1872 and 1873. 535 – 544
By the 1920s, the American Fish Culture Company of Carolina, Rhode Island, founded in the 1870s, was one of the leading producers of trout. During the 1940s, they perfected the method of manipulating the day- and night-cycle of fish so that they could be artificially spawned year-round.Rice, M.A. 2010. "A brief history of the American Fish Culture Company 1877–1997". Rhode Island History 68(1):20–35. web version
Californians harvested wild kelp and attempted to manage supply around 1900, later labeling it a wartime resource.
By country
Aquaculture by Country:
History
The Gunditjmara, a local Aboriginal Australian people in south-western Victoria, Australia, may have raised as early as about 4,580 BCE. See also attached documents: National Heritage List Location and Boundary Map, and Government Gazette, 20 July 2004. Evidence indicates they developed about of volcanic in the vicinity of Lake Condah into a complex of channels and dams, and used woven Fishing trap to capture , and to preserve them to eat all year round. Aborigines may have farmed eels, built huts ABC Science News, 13 March 2003. Lake Condah Sustainability Project . Retrieved 18 February 2010. The local Budj Bim Cultural Landscape, a World Heritage Site, is one of the oldest known aquaculture sites in the world.
Samoans practised "a traditional form of [[giant clam]] ranching".
See also
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