Turn shrimp into vegetarians? It could solve aquaculture’s sustainability problem

Novel amino and fatty acid feed additives promise to remove wild fish from the diet of farmed ones

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Half the fish we eat are farmed, and the share is growing. This would seem to be good news for the world’s depleting wild fish stocks. But the dirty secret is that many of those farmed fish are being fed wild fish for dinner.

Almost a quarter of the 85 million metric tons of wild fish caught each year are used as food for cultivated species. That’s a problem, given that the United Nations says at least half of the world’s recognized fish stocks are fully exploited and about one-third are overexploited or depleted.
One way to put the brakes on this unsustainable food system is to remove meal made from wild fish from the diets of farmed fish. Industry has already begun pursuing this strategy by replacing fish meal with proteins from plants such as soy, wheat, and pea and adding a dose of amino acids and fatty acids.

Small startups and big chemical companies such as DSM and Evonik Industries are now developing a wider range of the essential amino acids and fatty acids that salmon, shrimp, and other carnivorous aquatic species get from their diets so that wild fish can be completely removed. Increasingly, feed additives that started out for land animals are being adapted and applied in aquaculture. Farmed fish could be about to go vegetarian.

Read more at : http://cen.acs.org/articles/94/i29/Turn-shrimp-vegetarians-solve-aquacultures.html