Our readers know that a day on the ocean is good medicine for the soul. Now medical research has confirmed that eating your catch is also good medicine for mind and body. In particular, the omega-3 long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids found in seafood can help protect against heart disease, cancer, arthritis, and mental problems. With the good news, though, we’ve received plenty of bad news. Researchers report that most ocean fisheries are over-exploited and 90% of the large fish in the ocean are already gone. According to one (controversial) analysis, over a third of ocean fisheries have already collapsed, and if current trends continue, the remainder will collapse by 2048. Other research shows that eating fish can be bad for the environment and dangerous to our health, due to accumulations of PCBs, mercury, and other toxic contaminants.

Aquaculture promised to feed the world healthily without depleting wild fish stocks. After all, we grow our food on land, rather than depend on wild game. Doesn’t it make sense to do the same at sea? That promise has become an ever-accelerating reality, with world consumption of cultured aquatic life now roughly equal to consumption of wild-harvested products. However the environmental reality has not matched the expectation. Up to 5 lbs. of wild fish may be required to produce one pound of cultured fish. Coastal nursery areas for wild fish have been destroyed to build aquaculture ponds. Diseases and parasites from cultured fish have spread to wild populations. Captive fish have escaped and bred with wild fish, causing unknown damage to the genetics of the wild populations. Wild salmon populations have declined in areas where fish farms were placed. Uneaten feed, fish wastes, and any hormones, antibiotics, pesticides or herbicides used to treat fish in ocean cages go right into the environment. Predators, including sharks and orcas, attracted to fish pens have in some cases been killed, or displaced from their natural habitat. Should a responsible ocean-lover avoid cultured fish altogether?

Enter Neil Anthony Sims, marine biologist, entrepreneur, and president and CEO of Kona Blue Water Farms in Hawaii. Sims can sermonize about saving the oceans with the fervor of a tent-revival preacher, rhapsodize about the nutritional and epicurean qualities of his product with the earnestness of a young man in love, and discuss the challenges of farming fish in the open ocean with the deep concern of a rancher looking out for his livestock. Although his various goals often seem to pull him in different directions, Sims insists that he can satisfy discriminating and health-conscious consumers, advance scientific knowledge, have a beneficial impact on the ocean, and make money all at the same time.

Kona Blue’s product, trademarked as Kona Kampachi, is known to fishermen as almaco jack, and to scientists as Seriola rivoliana. It was not recognized as a separate species from amberjack by Hawaiians, and was only discovered to exist in the wild in Hawaii in 2002. Wild specimens carry high loads of ciguatera toxin and flesh parasites, and are rarely eaten. The cultured fish avoid these problems, although an external parasite has been a problem, and are much higher in omega-3 oils than the wild fish. “Most of this goes to either sushi restaurants or white table restaurants,” says Sims. “It’s very high-end. We’re about the 2nd or 3rd most expensive fish on the market.” “It’s been getting rave reviews from chefs,” he adds. “people are given to poetry by this fish.” Indeed the Obamas’ personal chef pronounced it “the most amazing fish I’ve ever worked with,” after preparing it for the first family.

Kona Kampachi, appears on the safe seafood and sushi lists of Monterey Bay Aquarium, Environmental Defense Fund, and Blue Ocean Institute as “hamachi” or “yellowtail (U.S. farmed).” All three organizations give it an intermediate, or yellow rating (between green=best choice and red=avoid), described as “Eco-OK” by EDF and “good alternative” by MBA. “The first time that Monterey Bay Aquarium fish ranked any fish grown in the ocean anything other than red-avoid was Kona Kampachi’s ranking,” boasts Sims.

This breakthrough ranking in 2008 was largely due to Kona Blue addressing two concerns of environmental groups. The first, according to George Leonard, director of Ocean Conservancy’s aquaculture program, was “…to farm fish that are as close to wild fish as possible, so that if there are any escapes the impacts on wild populations are relatively small compared to non-native fish or native fish that have been heavily selected on for growth characteristics or disease resistance. In the case of Neil, what I always felt was good about his facility was he was essentially growing a wild fish. He was using brood stock management techniques that resulted in fish that were no farther than two generations removed from wild fish, and he was ensuring that he was bringing wild brood stock periodically into the gene pool. And he was farming a strain that was local to the farm.”

The second is the problem of cultured fish requiring an excess of wild fish as inputs in the form of fish meal and fish oil, potentially depriving both humans and wild fish of food resources. “One of the things I think is really nice about Neil,” says Leonard, “is that he’s willing to think about what the conservation community has to say, look at his practices in that light, and determine whether there is a productive way forward. Feed is a good example. He has worked hard to reduce his reliance on wild forage fish as feed input. He has looked for sustainable alternatives in terms of grain products. He’s used trimmings from otherwise well-managed wild capture fisheries.”

Sims continues to experiment with feed formulas, hoping to reduce his reliance on meal and oil from forage fish, and bump up his ranking with the environmental watchdogs. “We’re testing diets that would be zero fish in to fish out. That would get us a green ranking,” he says. The current Kona Blue feed formula, utilizing soy protein, soy oils, wheat gluten, corn gluten, canola oil, and poultry processing byproducts in addition to fish meal and oil that originates with Peruvian anchovies, results in a conversion ratio that according to Sims is “somewhere between 1:1 and 2:1” pounds of anchovy to pounds of product. The new diet would replace all the anchovy with “marine processing byproducts.” In any case, Sims notes that many wild fish feed higher on the food chain, with energy losses at each predatory step. “If you were to eat a wild swordfish or a wild Chilean sea bass,” he say, “in terms of the Peruvian anchovy equivalents, they are around 60:1. So if it’s true that we should be targeting the base of the food chain, Kona Kampachi can be 60 times more efficient in using limited ocean resources.”

Environmentalists noted that his paper outlining this logic had not been submitted to a scientific peer-review process. Furthermore, his new feed formula has cost him at least one major account. Whole Foods stopped carrying Kona Kampachi due to complaints from vegetarians who eat fish, but objected to fish fed poultry by-products. Additional criticism came from consumer watchdog Food and Water Watch. Marianne Cufone, Director of Fish Programs, says “changing what you’re feeding your fish to poultry by-products or even soy is very troubling. Soy doesn’t belong in the ocean.” The changes in diet could presumably result in a decrease in omega-3 oil ratios and an increase in contaminants, although Sims reports that his fish are still “loaded” with omega-3 and mercury and other contaminants are “undetectable.”

Cufone brought up another environmental problem with Kona Blue’s practices: shipping feed in from all over the world, then air-freighting fish out to customers. “Some restaurants that carry Kona have told me that they’ve gotten it overnight mail. So factoring in the carbon footprint of the delivery process seems to me to exclude the possibility of sustainability.” Kona Blue has recently moved a lot of their grow-out production to Baja Mexico, which will allow ground shipping to their largest markets on the U.S. West Coast. However, that has raised flags at Ocean Conservancy. Even though almaco jack are native to both Hawaiian and Mexican waters, there may be genetic differences between the Hawaiian stock and the Mexican stock. Leonard says “We’d have concerns about that, because it gets away from this idea of farming fish that are native to the local geography and ensuring that the  genetic divergence is minimized.”

To control skin flukes, Sims says he uses “an integrated pest management strategy. We keep our stocking densities low, we clean the nets regularly, and we’ve located our farm in an area with deep water and with brisk currents. If they reach a level where we need to apply a therapeutic bath, we use a dilute hydrogen peroxide solution under the oversight of USFWS, FDA, and EPA. It breaks down rapidly in sunlight to water and oxygen. It is about the most benign treatment that you could use.” However, Kona Blue has had to resort to occasional applications of a veterinary antibiotic (also under government permit) for bacterial infections, and has applied for permission to conduct trials of a feed additive to help manage the flukes.

“Some of the concerns we have,” says Cufone, “are water pollution and escaped farmed fish and … using public waters for private compensation.” With regards to pollution, Sims counters that “We have our water quality monitored on a monthly basis. We make the data available on our website. You cannot tell the difference in water quality upcurrent of the cages or downcurrent.” With regards to fish escaping and breeding, he say that “There are giant ulua (trevally) that have taken up residence around the cages, and it is voracious. It’s a bloodbath when fish escape,” adding that the caged fish are years away from reproductive maturity anyway.

About private use of public waters, Hawaii Department of Aquatic Resources biologist Dr. William Walsh says, “On land where there have been decades of commercial enterprise on state-owned land, you don’t get people screaming ‘How can somebody be making money on public lands?’ We’ve got cattle ranches all over the place that are leased state lands. In terms of Kona Blue, we view it as a big experiment. We added a coral reef monitoring site adjacent to their site. So far we have not detected anything on that reef area that we would say is attributable to the operations at Kona Blue. It’s a very beautiful area.”

Walsh and Cufone both expressed concerns that Kona Blue’s permit allows them to directly hire the consultants who perform the water and seafloor studies, potentially exposing the studies to the ‘consultant syndrome’ where consultants who report adverse effects may have problems attracting new clients. However, Walsh says, “I don’t think there is anything to suggest that we need to discontinue it because of environmental impact. I think they are still in the learning phase, and I think their request to change cages is part of that learning process.”

At press time, Kona Blue is installing new cages designed to resist predators, reduce fish escapes, bio-fouling and parasite buildup, and reduce the need for scuba divering for operations and maintenance, all of which could potentially reduce the environmental impact of their operations. “One of the things I think is really nice about Neil,” says Leonard, “is that he’s willing to think about what the conservation community has to say, look at his practices in that light, and then determine whether there is a productive way forward.” Walsh agrees, “I think they’ve been an exemplar of trying to do things the right way,” but adds “one should definitely recognize that there is an environmental price to pay for putting lots of animals in a confined space.” Leonard asks, “What if there were 10 or 20 or 50 of those farms up or down the coast, …think about cumulative impact. Is legislation needed to ensure a sustainable future?”

To this, Sims says, “We are part of a dialogue process led by the World Wildlife Fund to define sustainability standards. There are a number of environmental groups that recognize that we are trying to work toward solutions, and that we may not yet be perfect in all that we do, but that we are part of the solution. If we are going to lessen our footprint on the ocean, responsible marine aquaculture has to be part of that solution.”

blog comments powered by Disqus