this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
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[–] usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml 15 points 2 days ago

Fish farms are not the environmental win they claim themselves to be. They can sometimes actually make things worse because they'll often take wild caught fish as feed too!

The sheer quantity of wild fish used in salmon farms is also a growing concern. About a fifth of the world’s annual wild fish catch, amounting to about 18m tonnes of wild fish a year, is used to make fishmeal and fish oil, of which about 70% goes to fish farms

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/feb/11/global-salmon-farming-harming-marine-life-and-costing-billions-in-damage

Environmental impact is not limited to salmon farming either. All kinds of fish farms dumps large amounts of waste into the environment

For a world annual shrimp production [in fish farms] of around 5 million tons, 5.5 million tons of organic matter, 360,000 tons of nitrogen, and 125,000 tons of phosphorous are annually discharged to the environment https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3353277/

They can also drive deforestation in some parts of the world too

Conversion to aquaculture is the most prevalent driver of mangrove deforestation across the tropics over the last 50 years generating substantial carbon emissions. Preventing further aquaculture expansion within mangrove forest areas will be essential to achieve national emission reduction targets in mangrove-holding countries.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.14774