World Aquaculture Magazine - June 2021

WWW.WA S .ORG • WORLD AQUACULTURE • JUNE 2021 27 where its developments are the most contentious, e.g. in the world’s coastal zones and oceans. In reality, aquaculture requests for space are comparable to small, well-planned “donut holes” in coastal oceans. The International Salmon Farmers Association (2018) estimated the area occupied by all of the world’s very valuable salmon aquaculture at 262 km 2 , or 0.00008 percent of the world’s ocean area (335 million km 2 ). Professor Helgi Thor Thorarensen of the Arctic University of Norway says the entire Norwegian salmon aquaculture “seaprint” could fit into the area of the Oslo airport. The public is concerned about aquaculture expansion in Maine, USA, where a widely available map (Fig. 6) shows dots of aquaculture’s expansion across the coast. Most of those dots are tiny, 37-m 2 licenses that must be renewed annually after training is completed (they are not leases). In Maine, there are 630 ha (1,558 acres) of aquaculture leases (salmon, oysters, mussels, seaweeds, etc.) of the 1.3 million ha (3.4 million acres) available. All of the leased area is used. But in the case of salmon— the largest aquaculture sector by production volume and value using Maine’s leased aquaculture area—approximately 30 percent of the leases are fallow due to site rotation (Andrew Lively, Cooke Aquaculture Inc., personal communication). Taken together, aquaculture comprises 0.005 percent of Maine’s coastal waters. Oyster aquaculture in Maine, although expanding in area before COVID-19, remains crowded in a tiny area of the upper reaches of the state’s Damariscotta River Estuary, where an estimated 70 percent of Maine’s oyster industry is located. Aquaculture adds high value for a very small space in comparison to any other food production system. And the big news seemingly announced every week— recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS) proposed throughout the world— largely occupy buildings akin to society’s big box stores and service warehouses, with many being planned for abandoned infrastructure in needy rural areas suffering from job losses due to globalization and other factors. Six Local-to-Global Reality Checks in Seaweed Aquaculture Seaweeds (Fig. 7) are indeed amazing multi-purpose organisms, but let’s be careful to not promise moons we cannot deliver. Despite being the most cultivated group of marine organisms globally, and having amazingly diverse properties useful in many applications, seaweeds have remained underappreciated and ignored until very recently. These organisms are routinely paid less attention than other inhabitants of the oceans because they do not have the popular appeal of an “emotional, charismatic species,” only a few have common names that everybody can pronounce, they do not produce flowers, they do not sing like birds, and they are not as cute as furry mammals! Moreover, they suffer from a deeply rooted zoological bias throughout our education systems which makes them rarely studied and understood appropriately, thus leading to generations of ill-informed marine academics, aquaculture practitioners, resource managers, bureaucrats, policy advisors, philanthropists and investors. If the FAO could consider seaweed aquaculture in the same way as any other component of the total world aquaculture production, and include the data of this sector directly in tables, figures and sections, with the data of the other sectors in animal ( C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 2 8 ) FIGURE 5. US seafood supply has increased while domestic production has decreased. Consumers see no decreased supplies and question scientific findings due to the large imports of fisheries products to the country, the largest in the world (National Marine Fisheries Service 2017). FIGURE 6. Map of aquaculture leases and licenses on the coast of Maine, USA. The coast is 5,600 km 2 which includes bays, inlets, and estuaries. Most of the green dots on this map are tiny, 37-m 2 LPAs (Limited Permit Access) licenses that need to be renewed annually after training; they are not aquaculture leases. In 2020, there were 760 (at some point) LPAs (Flora Drury, Maine Department of Marine Resources, personal communication). So, even though it looks like aquaculture is proliferating at a rapid pace—and this is overwhelming for some in the public to see—Maine’s aquaculture comprises just 630 ha (1558 aces) of active space, an area smaller than Rockland Harbor, a small town in central Maine with a total town size of 33 km 2 (Maine Aquaculture Association 2019). Green dots are active leases and licenses, yellow dots are pending, and red dots are terminated ones. FIGURE 7. Seaweeds at the UNE Farm in Saco Bay, Maine, USA.