Matt Thompson is a senior aquaculture specialist with the Aquarium’s Sustainable Seafood Programs (SSP). He is blogging from the Seafood Summit in Hong Kong. The Seafood Summit brings all those concerned with sustainable seafood together in a conference to identify challenges and look for solutions.  



Today, I had the great pleasure to moderate a panel at the Seafood Summit, it was entitled: “Untapped potential for sustainability: Exploring aquaculture innovation in Asian aquaculture.” The purpose of the panel was to call leading experts to give their opinions on some of the most effective technologies and practices in Asian aquaculture and identify how they can used in other global aquaculture industries to reduce the environmental and social impact of aquaculture.

My panel consisted of Dr. Malcolm Beveridge an aquaculture scientist from Worldfish Center who uses his extensive knowledge of the industry to tackle the environmental challenges of aquaculture, as well as poverty and hunger in the developing World; Olav Jamtøy from a company named Genomar that raises improved tilapia by selectively breeding them for things like faster growth ; Robins McIntosh, from CP Thailand, who is a pioneer in shrimp farming and actively works to move this improving industry towards ever better and more responsible practices, Dr. Rohana Subasinghe, a globally recognized leader that works with the FAO to analyze and predict trends in global aquaculture.

Collectively, the panel showed that Asian aquaculture was a leader in production in fish farming and had some of the most efficient fish farming systems globally. We all agreed that there is an opportunity to learn from these producers to increase global aquaculture production, which was important as we face a large shortfall in seafood supply relative to the demand of future generations. Another issue was that despite the rapid growth in aquaculture production, the numbers are below what they need to be to meet the growing demand. The panel highlighted challenges for the industry, including feed, technology, and finance. Disease and biosecurity (techniques to prevent the introduction of disease) were also identified, with Dr. Subasinghe highlighting that the annual losses from diseases in aquaculture cost around $6 billion. But innovation, creating ideas and technological solutions to address challenges in aquaculture, could offer us a way to expedite an increase in seafood production while addressing its environmental challenges. Innovations learned from shrimp and tilapia farming, such as selective breeding and biosecurity can improve efficiencies to, as Robins put it, we can “get more from less”. These innovations have the potential to be transferred to other aquaculture industries, especially the smaller-scale fish farmers that form the majority of the people working in aquaculture, around the world to increase production, profitability and food security – all while reducing aquacultures environmental footprint. My thanks again to the panel.

From the left, Me, Dr. Rohana Subasinghe, Dr. Malcolm Beveridge, Robins McIntosh, Olav Jamtøy

While there are great innovations in Asian aquaculture, there are also ongoing challenges. Additionally, innovations may not be used by all the farmers in the industry, making it important to source seafood from farms that make meaningful efforts to reduce their environmental impact.

– Matt

Matt Thompson is a senior aquaculture specialist with the Aquarium’s Sustainable Seafood Programs (SSP). He is going to be blogging from the Seafood Summit in Hong Kong. The Seafood Summit brings all those concerned with sustainable seafood together in a conference to identify challenges and look for solutions. 


Today’s meetings kicked off in style, with a traditional Chinese lion dance to welcome the Summit attendees.



After the show, two Chinese government officials addressed the Summit, including the Director of the Bureau of Fisheries. Their core message, that China had a rich history in terms of fisheries and aquaculture. Chinese aquaculture, they said, began around ~100 BC in China and later published in first ever fish farming manual in 460 BC. In more recent times (1980, so perhaps not that recently), China faced a decision to expand wild harvest fisheries or support aquaculture. They chose to embrace aquaculture, managing to exceed their harvest from wild fisheries with farmed-raised seafood, some 5.3 million metric tons, in as little as eight years! Both officials echoed that China was committed to sustainable fisheries and aquaculture, and that country was ready to work with various groups, including conservation organizations, to meet these conservation goals. Oh, and they also told us to enjoy some good shopping while we were in Hong Kong!



Another thought provoking presentation today was given Dr. Stephen Hall (pictured above) of the Worldfish Center, non-governmental organization that aims to reduce poverty and hunger by improving fisheries and aquaculture. Dr. Hall spoke about the difference between seafood demand, being what we want to eat, and seafood need, what people need to survive and be healthy- reminding us of the critical role that aquaculture plays both in food security as well as raising the tilapia and oysters that we see in our supermarkets. Another thought provoking point was that he felt that there was a tendency for organizations to focus their efforts on marine fisheries, with little attention to the freshwater fisheries and aquaculture that produce the lion’s share of the World’s fish.

The Aquariums seafood efforts might focus on improving the environmental performance of the seafood we eat in our homes and restaurants, but we do consider both marine and freshwater species. For example, our consumer-facing recommendations include several freshwater species, including tilapia farmed in the U.S., South and Central America.

Matt Thompson is a senior aquaculture specialist with the Aquarium’s Sustainable Seafood Programs (SSP), and he is going to be blogging from the Seafood Summit in Hong Kong. The Seafood Summit brings all those concerned with sustainable seafood together in a conference to identify challenges and look for solutions. 



I imagine some of you are asking: an aqua-what? Sustainable seafood? And what’s a Seafood Summit anyway?

Here’s a very quick introduction: For over 10 years the Aquarium has been a leader in a movement to reduce the environmental footprint of the seafood we eat. We’ve partnered with some of the largest seafood buyers in the U.S. – namely, Ahold USA (the parent company of Stop and Shop), Darden Restaurants (the parent company of Red Lobster and Olive Garden), Gorton’s of Gloucester (of fish stick fame), and Sea Port Products (a West Coast based seafood importer/distributor) to advise them on how they can use their influence to improve their sources of seafood. We also offer consumers advice on which seafood is a great choice for the environment; you can see this list here.

Matt arrives in Hong Kong

As for me, my role at the Aquarium is to study the environmental impact of farming seafood, like fish, shrimp and mussels—which is called aquaculture. For the past five years I’ve traveled the world, looking at fish and shrimp farms and showing farmers different ways to reduce their environmental impact.

The Seafood Summit brings all those concerned with sustainable seafood together in a conference to identify challenges and look for solutions. I’ll be reporting on the results of these discussions as the conference progresses.

October 16, 2010
Friday morning dawned brighter and more hopeful than the day before, so after relocating our remaining troops (who had distributed themselves across Rakiraki) we decided to venture back across the same flooded roads we'd arrived on. Keith was hoping for clearer skies, for photography, and lower, less fierce river flows. Our first stop took us to a coastal aquaculture development project, where villagers were raising milkfish, prawns and tilapia. Milkfish are large, streamlined silvery fishes--one of the few marine relatives of the freshwater carps and minnows.


(Photo: Keith Ellenbogen)

They are very bony, but prepared properly they can be delicious (see here for notes on deboning a bangus, or milkfish), and the young are sometimes cultivated as longline bait for the tuna fishery. Adult milkfish live around reefs and lagoons across much of the Indian and Pacific oceans. Like most marine fishes, their eggs and larvae drift on ocean currents, but after a few weeks the young swim up into mangrove forests to feed and grow.

Here, villagers can catch them for grow-out in dug-out ponds. The key is that the ponds must not be constructed in the mangrove forest, for this destroys the source habitat for the young milkfish along with all the other services that mangroves provide--coastal protection, nursery for reef fishes, home for wildlife. The villagers were also experimenting with prawns and tilapia. Milkfish and certain prawns are native to Fiji, but the introduction of tilapia (an African cichlid fish) has been highly destructive to the small, brightly colored freshwater fishes unique to Fiji's rivers. Aquaculture has faced a steep uphill climb in Fiji, but the facility that we visited was enterprising, well-run, and very promising.


Milkfish pond (Photo: Keith Ellenbogen)


Milkfish feeding frenzy (Photo: Keith Ellenbogen)

We had come to Ra ready for another kind of steep uphill climb, into the high ridge forests overlooking our marine study sites, but torrential rains put an end to those plans for this trip. Yep, we're wimps. Some 30 years ago, hunters for wild boar above the village of Narara stumbled across a mysterious, ancient archaeological site including 13 raised stones, and drawings and possibly writing on the walls of at least one cave. Fred Wesley, writing for the Fiji Times last December, described his journeys to the site. Granted, there are some aspects of ancient Fijian culture that we still practice and might better consider abandoning (like killing our enemies ... the fact that Fijians ate them afterwards, though unthinkable to us, was both culturally satisfying and nutritionally rational). However, there are others we ought to consider resurrecting in force.


Narara village (Photo: Keith Ellenbogen)

One of these more laudable cultural threads is the concept of vanua--a unity of land, sea and people as part of a common, interwoven and interdependent cosmos. This is very similar to the Hawaiian management system of ahupua'a. Both are common sense, and bolstered by strong science. The natural unit of function in all coastal regions is the watershed, from ridgetop to the outermost influences of coastal species and processes, which is a point way out at sea.

Whatever bad things you do in the vanua will come back to you and be visited upon everyone. On the other hand the ecological and social bonds within the local vanua are strong, and if you do good, that will come back and have visible effects in short order. The logic scales up: vanua are hierarchical, nested within each other on up to the world as a whole. What you do, comes back to you. This was probably the principal lesson of the research that Stacy and I have been involved in over the past several years. It is a lesson reinforced by Fiji's unique coral reef and river fishes, just as it is by the muddy plumes hurtling down from naked hillsides and curling out to sea in the wake of yesterday's downpour.

We could see the elements of vanua well on our trek home. From a coastal vantage point near Ra, we looked out to sea, past villages and headlands, to a tiny, dark, ghostly speck on the horizon: the island of Vatu-i-Ra, the "bird island" that we had explored above and below water with all our friends and shipmates on the Nai'a. Ridge to reef in a single eyeshot. Indeed, more than few of the seabirds foraging about the headlands of Ra today might well roost this night, and every night, among the Pisonia trees of Vatu-i-Ra.


View of Vatu-i-Ra from Rakiraki District headland (Photo: Keith Ellenbogen)

Turning inland, we mounted the coastal ridge of Nakurotubu, a mountainous divide covered by one of Fiji's largest tracts of native forest. This was the site of a Conservation International rapid species assessment. This forest also lies at the above-water epicenter of the northeast Viti Levu section of our Fiji "islandscape." The species survey reinforced the sense of isolation and self-containment within Fiji, but with strong linkages across habitats: nearly two-thirds of the ant species of Nakorotubu Mountain (ants are a useful ecological indicator) are unique to the area.




What a difference a day makes! Contrasting moods at the edge of the Nakurotubu Forest (Photos: Keith Ellenbogen)

It is not just ants that make Nakorotubu special; the place is full of Fiji's endemic birds and plants, along with all other possible life forms, each with its members unique to this place. When we stopped briefly at a government office for some business, I wandered off to the edge of a clearing to clear my own mind in the forest. I heard a strange call... like a small dog being strangled... familiar but unplaceable. Moments later, a searing flash of yellow whizzed by, trailing a blurred wake of surreal intensity: Viti Levu's golden dove. Too fast for a photo, the bird burned an indelible memory.

As we headed down out of the highlands, we noted that the water level in the brooks had gone down and they were now babbling and clear instead of roaring and muddy.


(Photo: Keith Ellenbogen)

We circled in and out along the coast, out to a headland, and in to a valley mangrove forest, out and in. The Bruguiera mangroves cast an atmosphere of impenetrable mystery in the fog, a rich, dark tangle of trunks mirrored by placid waters. The surrounding mudflat was a metropolis of kinked pneumatophores, breathing roots that rise above the mud to bring oxygen down to airless spaces.


Coastal village (Photo: Keith Ellenbogen)


Bruguiera mangrove forest (Photo: Keith Ellenbogen)

All too soon we were back in Suva and hailing a cab from the University of the South Pacific campus back to Five Princes Hotel, to be hosted once more by Roderick Evers and Tarei Weeks. We recounted our adventures and visit to Future Forests (narrowly missing Roderick there, as it turns out), and talked about forests and reefs in Fiji. The next morning, our last, I sat vigil on the veranda to photograph collared lory and butterflies in the garden while Keith hit the crafts market, waiting for my colleague Meo Semesi to arrive for breakfast.


(Photo: Les Kaufman)

Meo has been a core member of the Marine Management Area Science (MMAS) study team since its inception in Fiji, and is now considering going on from his masters at the University of the South Pacific in natural products chemistry, for a doctoral degree. One of his keenest interests is the science underlying the vanua concept. We talked for hours about his future, and that of all of Fiji, and the possible relationship between the two. We agreed to launch a Vanua Working Group to carry forward and expand upon the dreams articulated by a stream of senior conservation scientists, Fijian and expat, all of whom have seen the same light. With this resolution in place, the research and conservation objectives of the 2010 New England Aquarium-Monterey Bay Aquarium Fiji Expedition were completed. Reluctantly, we left for Nausori Airport, and the beginning of a long, multilegged trek back to the eastern U.S., Keith to New York, and me to Boston to rejoin Bailey and catch up once more with Mark.

Touchdown in Boston also brought field work for the 5-year MMAS program of Conservation International to a close. Usually these moments are bittersweet, but there was nothing bitter about this one. We had succeeded in completing 50 discrete studies of 73 marine management areas in 23 countries, partnered with more than 100 institutions and over 200 individuals (not counting whole villages). No wonder I was so tired before this trip. Many partners still have large, ongoing sister efforts, like Stacy's work with the Wildlife Conservation Society, and work in the Phoenix Islands pioneered by Bailey with the New England Aquarium.

Scientific papers, outreach booklets, films, and television spots are flowing. We have plenty of data yet to pore through and learn from. What we have learned already has resculpted the missions of many of the participating institutions, not the least, CI. CI has, since its inception, championed the preservation of biological diversity on Earth, by laboring to arrest the mass extinction now underway. What it had not done explicitly before, is to link to human welfare as an essential term in the overall equation of survival. Undoubtedly the Fiji Islandscape will help teach us how. From ridgetop to tabu (marine reserve, as discussed in this previous post) in Nakorotubu, to Dr. Webster's transect on Mount Mutiny, and out across Bligh Water. From Namena in Kubalau past the friendly village of Kiobo and up to the forested ridgetops above it. We have paced the perimeter of our window on the future, our vanua, in the heart of Fiji.

All of the expedition members are now home or already off on other adventures. Some have reported in with greetings, pictures and anecdotes. Sam Campbell donated all of his video from the trip, and we plan to work together with the Nai'a crew to standardize documentation of change over time in the regularly visited on her peregrinations.

The expedition is over.


Expedition team (Photo: Keith Ellenbogen)

The journey has just begun.

Les Kaufman, PhD