Popular Aussie restaurant item set to disappear from menus
Fish farming is set to dominate the seafood industry, but it will likely lead to some species disappearing from menus.
Popular ocean fish could disappear from restaurant menus and supermarket shelves in favour of farmed varieties as aquaculture becomes cheaper and more widespread than commercial trawling.
Species like tuna and salmon that thrive in ocean pens will be commonplace, but other species which grow slowly in captivity will likely become niche and hard to find. Ocean ecology specialist Professor Jianguang Qin explained yellowtail kingfish is the latest fish to be successfully farmed. But others grow too slowly to make them commercially viable, because raising them over a long period of time is expensive and risky.
“For fisheries the only cost is going to the ocean and catching them, but for aquaculture we need to consider if they will make money or not. For example the King George whiting is a wonderful fish in the ocean, however when they try to cultivate them in aquaculture their growth is too slow they can’t make money out of it,” he said.
Would 'whiting' disappear from menus?
King George whiting is one of the most commonly eaten fish in Australia, particularly in restaurants. But if King George whiting wasn't able to be commercially farmed, we still may not see "whiting" disappear completely. That's because there are several other whiting species.
"King George whiting is not necessarily the most popular fish in this category. Sand whiting and school whiting both sell in much higher volumes than King George whiting at our daily auction," Sydney Fish Market's head of quota Gus Dannoun told Yahoo.
When homogenisation of available foods happened before
Qin, who is based at Flinders University, believes farmed fish will increasingly become dominant and the switch can help ease pressures on wild populations that are stressed by warming water temperatures and overfishing.
It will be the biggest change to commercial fishing since super-trawlers began revolutionising the industry in the 1950s, but it could have a downside in terms of limiting the variety of species available. This homogenisation could mirror the 20th century’s agricultural green revolution which saw high-yield crops becoming dominant, and rare plants and seeds becoming less common. Some low-yield grains even faced extinction.
Qin hopes lessons will be learned from the green revolution, and that the upcoming blue revolution could actually save some species from extinction. In Victoria, researchers are hoping to “crack the code” and understand the conditions required to beed endangered Macquarie perch, a fish so rare anglers are banned from catching.
How fish farming will become more environmentally friendly
China appears to be leading the way in aquaculture and it is successfully breeding over a dozen commercial species including yellowfin tuna, mackerel tuna, and even coral trout.
Fish farming has reputational problems in Australia, largely due to pollutants created around salmon farms in Tasmania that have pushed a native species, the Maugean skate, to the brink of extinction. But Qin thinks new technologies have the ability to reduce pollutants by controlling nitrogen levels through multi-layered farms that mimic the natural environment. These structures use oysters to filter the waste created by fish, and seaweed to further dissolve nutrients in the water.
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By controlling the production environment, Qin believes fish produced using aquaculture will actually be "safer" for consumers. In particular, toxic materials like mercury which are commonplace in larger species like shark, which is commonly sold as flake, will be less prevalent in species chosen for aquaculture .
Qin’s paper New Techniques in Marine Aquaculture has been published in the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering.
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