How far have we come in aquaculturing saltwater fish instead of taking them from the ocean?

[seafoodengineer]

I know of certain companies like ORA who are helping lead this movement but I don't see a particular place where progress is being tracked.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I assume about 90% of fish being sold online and in pet stores is harvested directly from the ocean.

Where can I learn more about the progress being made?

 

[ISpeakForTheSeas]

I know of certain companies like ORA who are helping lead this movement but I don't see a particular place where progress is being tracked.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I assume about 90% of fish being sold online and in pet stores is harvested directly from the ocean.

Where can I learn more about the progress being made?

What sort of progress are you looking for? Are you looking to see which fish have been bred successfully and thus could be aquacultured and sold, or are you looking to see how many aquacultured fish are being sold and if there is an increasing number of aquacultured vs wild caught being sold?

If you're looking to find species that have been/could be aquacultured so far, ORA, Biota, Rising Tide Conservation, Frank Baensch, Bali Aquarich, and MBIsite (Marine Breeding Initiative - the site is currently outdated, but it still lists a number of species that have been cultured) are all great places to start.

If you're looking to see numbers of aquacultured fish sold or to see if those numbers are rising (either on their own or as a percent total of all fish sales), I'm not sure where to look for that information. I would imagine someone on Reef2Reef could point you in the right direction, though, so consider this post a bump if that's the case.

 

[PatW]

Aquacultured fish are great for the hobby. Decades ago, I kept freshwater systems and back then many fish were wild caught. But as time went by more and more were tank raised.

In the marine category, the more exotic (expensive) fish are the best targets. I would think that it would be hard to make any money on $5 chromis. For that reason, I would be willing to pay a premium for aquaculture.

Also, aquaculture has quite a few advantages.
1) The fish are used to eating things like pellets.
2) The fish are used to aquariums (maybe much larger than our home tanks but even so).
3) the supply chain is shorter. Say from aquaculture to middleman to LFS. In many cases, it would be aquaculture to LFS. For pacific species, it often is person who caught the fish, local wholesaler, shipped to wholesaler in the US, then shipped to LFS. The fish is stressed on each stage and often ends up in your tank malnourished.
4) Aquacultured fish are presumably pretty disease free. A wild caught fish can have disease when it is caught or catch a disease on any stop along the way.

A disadvantage of aquaculture would be a possible lack of genetic diversity. One really should bring in a wild caught fish periodically to inject some genetic diversity in your strain.

 

[livinlifeinBKK]

When they can bring the price down on aquacultured fish I'll definitely be interested in them but as it stands now, prices are outrageous (not unfair for the company because I know a LOT of research and work goes into these projects)...but right now when you put a CB Regal next to a wild caught Regal with the price tags included, it's just no contest right now with what the vast majority of people would choose

 

[davidcalgary29]

Correct me if I'm wrong but I assume about 90% of fish being sold online and in pet stores is harvested directly from the ocean.

That may be true in terms of sourcing across all available species -- no one is probably breeding clingfish or hogchokers at this point -- but I'd argue that 90% of some species being sold to the public are probably captive-bred specimens. Case in point: my lovely orchid dottybacks, which are generally good-natured and suitable for a community tank WHEN captive-bred, but are apparently awful jerks when captured from the wild. I haven't seen a wild-caught fridmani in some time, in fact. Springeris also fall into this category.

I think this statistic would also be most probably true for clownfish, which are surely the most widely-sold marine aquarium fish, and the other damselfish, if you want to risk them. Wild caught yellow tangs are a rare thing nowadays, and I have two species of captive-bred filefish. Even angelfish are coming on line: all of the lemonpeels that I've seen for sale in Canada over the past two years have been captive-bred, and the odd captive-bred navarchus also pops up for sale here and there. I've even seen the new captive-bred regal angels up for sale, although at a hefty price.

 

[TastesLikeChicken]

Most are still harvested from the ocean. Even when there is captive bred available, many people will choose the lower priced wild caught. We have a long ways to go unfortunately.

 

[davidcalgary29]

Most are still harvested from the ocean. Even when there is captive bred available, many people will choose the lower priced wild caught.

We can blame some of that -- perhaps a great deal of that -- on our stupid search engines. There's a fantastic seller in Edmonton (which qualifies as "local" for me), and he's a regular, reliable source of yellow tangs, which are difficult to get in Canada. All of them are captive-bred and are kept in beautiful condition, and reasonably-priced, too. None of them, however, are advterised as "captive-bred". When I expressed my incredulity -- surely this is a selling point! -- he told me that adding the words "captive-bred" actually reduced relevant searches and reduced the number of hits he got on the fish. I bet a fair number of other online vendors have been hit by this stupidity as well, and, even if they have captive-bred fish, don't advertise them as such in order to maximize search potential.