Will New Aqua Feed Save Ocean Life From Extinction?

 If you are a social media animal, you could not have missed the obituary to the Great Barrier Reef, which went viral in October 2016. Since then, scientists have confirmed that a large part of it is dead from two consecutive world-level coral bleaching events.

What was most striking about the extinction event is that it is not caused by any direct human intervention. Instead, one can think of the reef as a sensor to the health of Earth's oceans. The reef is dying not because someone is killing it, but because oceans are chronically and perhaps terminally ill.

What ails our oceans? Many things, including the almost intractable problem of global warming, but one practice does stick out: the practice of destructive ocean fishing.

Since our inception, we have captured fish and aquatic life mostly from the wild. But with the population explosion and growing demand, the ocean and the rivers cannot satiate our hunger any more. Since the mid-1980s, the share of wild capture in global fish supply has been steadily decreasing, being supplemented by exponential growth in aquaculture. Ironically, this growth of aquaculture has proved catastrophic for marine life.

There is a name to this catastrophe: omega-3 fatty acid. We all know how beneficial this fatty acid is to the human body, and that we get most of our omega-3 fatty acids from fishes. But what we do not know is that fish do not actually produce omega-3 fatty acid. Instead, they gather it by consuming the microalgae that produce it, or by preying upon microalgae-eating fishes. This, for the longest time, posed a challenge to aqua-culturists: farmed fishes always had lesser nutrients than the wild ones. To counter this 'malnutrition', aqua feed companies started to use fish oil and fish meal as the main ingredients in aqua feeds. Where did this fish oil and meal come from? Foraged the sea, of course. Although we are not eating ocean fish that much anymore, the farmed fishes have been consuming them more than ever before.

How bad has that been? A report by a market research firm, states, 'The current dependence on fish meal and fish oil, as primary ingredients of aqua feed, is expensive and environmentally unsustainable'. Not only is the marine life fast-depleting, catching and processing them has become equally expensive.

And here is the good news: the aqua feed industry is committed to break out of this problem, and is pushing to get worldwide governments' ratifications for their innovative solutions. Over the last few years, the industry has become convinced that it must engineer sustainable alternatives to the use of fish oil and meals.