aquaculture landscape

I received a newsletter from the European Commission, Research Information Centre. Headlines shouting: Aquaculture comes of age! Dead fishes illustrated the article.

And their glorious shouting continued. The European Commission wanted to teach me about 'aquaculture landscape'!

quote: "Each year, more than 160 million tonnes of fish are consumed by the world’s population. Almost half of this volume is produced in controlled environments, where the fish is cultured rather than harvested from the wild. The system, known as aquaculture, dates back thousands of years, and today operates as a welcome alternative to the sea’s over-exploited natural resources. A recent workshop hosted by the Reprofish and AquaBreeding projects (funded by the European Union at a total of EUR 383 014) highlighted the efforts in place to enhance industry practices and improve the quality of aquatic animals and fish reared in Europe."end of quote

What? Was this really true: aquaculture dated back thousands of years? My European teacher continued: it was invented by Egyptians and Chinese, around 2500 BC! But today, it was the most promissing fastest growing food-production sector.

quote: "'Most of the fish that people eat nowadays in many European restaurants come from the aquaculture industry,' explained Dr Olivier Kah, coordinator of Reprofish, a project funded by the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) aimed at better understanding, accessing and communicating fish reproduction research."end of quote

And Dr. Kah continued, explaining his view on future: quote"'Reproduction is life,' said Dr Kah. 'If animals do not reproduce it is the end of the chain. It is a very complex function that involves a lot of internal factors — from an organism and interactions within an organism to input from the environment (such as temperature) — which help the organism decide whether it will reproduce or not. This is what we are trying to understand; why a fish starts reproducing, how we can control this mechanism, how we can master it, and use this knowledge to culture fish.'"end of quote

Is aquaculture really what we need, or what we want? I am not so sure about that! Anyhow, this item deserves a place in Vickx Wonder World.

If you like to read the article yourself, please go to:
http://ec.europa.eu/research/infocentre/article_en.cfm?id=/research/headlines/news/article_08_10_16_en.html&item=Infocentre&artid=8553

If you like to read more about mr. Kah 's organisation Reprofish, visit:

http://www.reprofish.eu/reprofish_eng/qu_est_ce_que_reprofish