Responsible aquaculture development for the next millennium

With the world population doubling in size from 3 to 6 billion people from 1960 to 1999 and currently growing at 1.33% per year (or an annual net addition of 78 million people), and expected to reach 7.3 to 10.7 billion by 2050 (with 8.9 billion considered most likely), there are growing doubts as to the long term sustainability of many traditional agricultural food production systems in being able to meet the increasing global demand for food. Nowhere is this more critical than within many of the world s developing countries, and in particular within those Low-income Food-deficit countries (LIFDC ; currently representing over 62% of the world s population), which are net importers of food and lack sufficient earnings to purchase food to cover their basic dietary needs. Of the multitude of agricultural food production systems, aquaculture is widely viewed as being an important potential candidate capable of contributing to reductions in the shortfall in the terrestrial food basket. Aquaculture, the farming of aquatic plants and animals, has been the fastest growing food production sector for over a decade. Total global production from aquaculture more than tripled from 10 million metric tons (mmt) in 1984 to over 36 mmt in 1997, and production grew at an average compound rate of 1 l% per year since 1984. In contrast to traditional livestock food production systems, the bulk of global aquaculture is realised within developing countries (89.6% total) and LIFDCs (80.6% total). Despite its good prospects and apparent potential for continued growth, the aquaculture sector has not been without its problems and critics. In particular, there have been concerns raised related to deficiencies in existing aquaculture legislation and planning methods, the use of certain farming practices, issues of resource use efficiency, disease treatment and control, environmental degradation, social welfare, and employment opportunities, etc. Although the majority of these are not unique to the aquaculture sector, it is imperative that these issues be addressed and resolved if the sector is to emerge into a major global food production sector in the next millennium. In addition, the present paper reviews the origins and salient features of the FAO Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries (CCRF), and in particular of Article 9 of CCRF concerning aquaculture development. An overview is also presented of ongoing and planned initiatives concerning the implementation of the code. In particular, the paper attempts to consider the existing socioeconomic conditions of the majority of aquaculture producing countries within the Asian region, and the real basic need of identifying affordable and practical solutions to aid the development of the sector. Particular emphasis is placed on the need of government to provide an enabling economic and legislative environment and umbrella for the sustainable and responsible development of the sector, and the need for increased collaboration between the private and public sector organizations, and government engaged in all stages of the aquaculture development process.The first author would like to acknowledge the support of the Tropical Aquaculture Feeds and Culture Technology Development Project II: Development of Shrimp Feeds, USDA-ARS Grant Agreement No. 59-5320-7-989. Both authors are most grateful for the kind invitation by the SEAFDEC Aquaculture Department to join the 1999 ADSEA Seminar-Workshop

Fish oil in aquaculture : in retrospect

The use of fish oils by aquaculture is the key impediment on the future growth and sustainability of the industry. Fish oil, the key provider of health-beneficial omega-3 long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids, fluctuates drastically in supply and cost, and is extracted unsustainably from world oceans. Resultantly, its persistent use has fueled a heated global debate and sparked a generation of research focus into possible means of reducing the aquaculture industry\u27s dependence on this resource. This chapter introduces the subject of fish oil usage in aquaculture on a global basis, and briefly traces the history of related issues. Accordingly, the major fish species utilized for fish meal and fish oil production are traced and the chemical and nutritional characteristics of fish oils of different origins are provided. The future expected availability of fish oil for aquaculture and the sustainability of the reduction industry are subsequently discussed.<br /

Responsible aquaculture and trophic level implications to global fish supply

Hunger and malnutrition remain among the most devastating problems facing the world&rsquo;s poor and needy, and continue&nbsp;to dominate the health and well-being of the world&rsquo;s poorest nations. Moreover, there are growing doubts as to the long-term sustainability of many existing food production systems, including capture fisheries and aquaculture, to meet the future increasing global demands.Of the different agricultural food production systems, aquaculture (the farming of aquatic animals and plants) is widely viewed as an important weapon in the global fight against malnutrition and poverty, particularly within developing countries where over 93% of global production is currently produced, providing in most instances an affordable and a much needed source of high quality animal protein, lipids, and other essential nutrients. The current article compares for the first time the development and growth of the aquaculture sector and capture fisheries by analyzing production by mean trophic level. Whereas marine capture fisheries have been feeding the world on high trophic level carnivorous fish species since mankind has been fishing the oceans, aquaculture production within developing countries has focused, by and large, on the production of lower trophic level species. However, like capture fisheries, aquaculture focus within economically developed countries has been essentially on the culture of high value-, high trophic level-carnivorous species. The long term sustainability of these production systems is questionable unless the industry can reduce its dependence upon capture fisheries for sourcing raw materials for feed formulation and seed inputs. In line with above, the article calls for the urgent need for all countries to adopt and adhere to the principles and guidelines for responsible aquaculture of the FAO Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries

Achieving sustainable aquaculture: Historical and current perspectives and future needs and challenges

Important operational changes that have gradually been assimilated and new approaches that are developing as part of the movement toward sustainable intensive aquaculture production systems are presented via historical, current, and future perspectives. Improved environmental and economic sustainability based on increased efficiency of production continues to be realized. As a result, aquaculture continues to reduce its carbon footprint through reduced greenhouse gas emissions. Reduced use of freshwater and land resources per unit of production, improved feed management practices as well as increased knowledge of nutrient requirements, effective feed ingredients and additives, domestication of species, and new farming practices are now being applied or evaluated. Successful expansion into culture of marine species, both off and on shore, offers the potential of substantial increases in sustainable intensive aquaculture production combined with integrative efforts to increase efficiency will principally contribute to satisfying the increasing global demand for protein and food security needs

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Effects of different protein and carbohydrate contents on growth and survival of juveniles of southern Chilean freshwater crayfish, Samastacus spinifrons

In cultivated aquatic organisms nutritional requirements are critical, not only for their impact on production techniques, but also, for their high incidence on production costs. There is limited knowledge on some species such as the southern Chilean freshwater crayfish, Samastacus spinifrons. In order to generate practical knowledge, a study was carried out to determine protein and carbohydrate content requirements. These factors were evaluated upon their effects on growth and survival of juveniles. For this purpose, individual weight, biomass gain, survival, and feed conversion parameters were measured. The assay was carried out in 42 days, It was conducted in a flow through system, using 21 plastic tanks of 10.6 L capacity. Each tank was seeded with 20 juveniles weighing 50 mg average each. A 3x2 factorial design was proposed with three protein contents (20, 30, 40%) and two carbohydrate contents (low: from 16.3 to 23.5% and high: from 34.6 to 35.8%). Six treatments and three replicates were performed. Individuals were fed on apparent satiation once a day. The diets formulated with 30% of protein and the two carbohydrate contents resulted in higher biomass increases, food conversion efficiencies over 26%, and specific growth rate of 0.78%, all displaying significant differences. Survival showed highly significant differences; in all diets were superior to 60%, however the diets with 30% of protein surpassed 90%

Personalizing and targeting therapy for COPD - The role of molecular and clinical biomarkers

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a heterogeneous disease characterized by persistent airflow limitation. It is the third leading cause of death worldwide, and there are currently no curative strategies for this disease. Many factors contribute to COPD susceptibility, progression and exacerbations. These include cigarette smoking, environmental and occupational pollutants, respiratory infections and comorbidities. As the clinical phenotypes of COPD are so variable, it has been difficult to devise an individualized treatment plan for patients with this complex chronic disease. This review will highlight how potential clinical, inflammatory, genomic and epigenomic biomarkers for COPD could be used to personalize treatment, leading to improved disease management and prevention for our patients