"THAT'S BECAUSE YOU'RE AN EVIL AQUACULTURE SCIENTIST……….."

Ian Bricknell. Aquaculture Research Institute,
School of Marine Sciences University of Maine
Orono, ME, 04469-5735,
USA.
Email Ian.bricknell@maine.edu

The eminent marine biologist Jacques Cousteau once said "We must plant the sea and herd its animals using the sea as farmers instead of hunters. That is what civilization is all about - farming replacing hunting". Yet today we regularly see quotes from newspapers that put aquaculture in a different light. For example in 2013 the UK's Daily Mail newspaper ran a headline "How long before YOU are eating frankenfish: It grows at terrifying speed and could wipe out other species". How has aquaculture shifted from an ideal, key to civilization, to a pariah in 40 years?

I will present a personal view on the media's impact on the perception of aquaculture using examples I have encountered during my 4-decade career as an aquaculture researcher. These will include examples, such as blaming the decline of sea trout populations in Scotland on the impact of aquaculture (figure 1), when the real picture actually shows a much longer-term decline which is multifactorial (figure 2).

Such blatant manipulation of data is galling to scientists, as well as unethical. Yet the scientific community is usually not able to counteract this misinformation. The question has to be why?  One issue has to be how scientists, and aquaculturists, communicate their findings. It is typical for a scientist to publish their findings in academic journals, which are jargon rich, physically inaccessible, expensive to buy and written for other specialists in the field. Where are the user-friendly websites, the simple take home messages of how large scale aquaculture has improved over the last 50 years and why we need it to feed the worlds burgeoning population? Why doesn't every child who wonders at a goldfish realize this is a domestic animal developed almost 2,000 years ago because of aquaculture? Indeed why don't they realize aquaculture is almost as old as agriculture itself.

So what has happened to the blue revolution that Jacques Cousteau referred to? Is it just bad press and we simply need a better publicist, or something else?