Focus 580; Aquaculture

This is focus 580 our telephone talk program Money's David inch. Glad to have you listening. The producers for this program Jack Brighton Harriet Williamson on the board this morning. Brian where there and just a quick mention that tomorrow morning on the program in the first hour of our show we'll be speaking with Millard Fuller He's founder and president of Habitat for Humanity International He'll be joining us by telephone. And then here in studio we'll have Jeff Ford He's executive director of Habitat for Humanity in Champaign County and we'll be talking about this organization what they do both internationally and regionally. Then in the second part of the show we'll talk about some issues in women's health and there are guest will be Judy again senior program officer with the Boston's Boston a women's health book collective. The folks who produced that now famous volume Our Bodies Ourselves will be tomorrow morning the second part of the show. We're here weekday mornings from 10:00 until noon we have 10 different topics for you each week. We always give you the opportunity to call in when you have questions and comments. You may also find us on the web where broadcasting webcasting

24 hours a day. So if you like you can listen through your computer. Also we have archives there of interviews from past focus programs also afternoon magazine commodity week side track news features. Also it's stuff there that you can listen to any time you like. It's all at w i l l dot UIUC dot edu just go there click on listen and if you have not done this before there is free software available there. You got to look closely to get it but it's there you don't have to pay money for it. If you're interested in listening through your computer's again w while Dot UIUC dot edu That's the address and you can check it out. This morning in the second hour focus 580 will be talking about aqua culture or perhaps in more plain speech we're talking about fish farming when in the last few years a number of years the seafood industry around the world has been going through a major transition moving away from mostly fish that have

been caught in the wild so to speak and moving towards Fish farming as a source of seafood. The end will be talking this morning sort of about this and its environmental implications with our gas. Dr. Rebecca Goldberg she is a biologist in the New York office of the Environmental Defense Fund and in fact is director of ETF biotechnology program. She's written about this and other subjects and for the fund She has her academic training is at the University of Minnesota. She has a master's degree in statistics and Ph.D. in ecology and behavioral biology from Minnesota she joined the staff of the Environmental Defense Fund in one thousand eighty seven. And she's joining us this morning by telephone. As we talked with Dr. Goldberg questions are certainly welcome. The number here in Champaign Urbana 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. We also do have a toll free line that's good anywhere that you can hear us around Illinois Indiana.

Anywhere that signal trouble you may use the toll free line and the calls on us. That's 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5 again and if you match the numbers in the letters on the phone you get w i l l so this may or may not make it easier 3 3 3 W while L and toll free 800 to 2 2 W while Dr. Goldberg Hello. Right. Thanks for talking with us today. Thanks for inviting me to be on your show. Well I think it's an interesting area of course here. Here there is a lot of farming that's going on but it's a different kind of farming. So for us this is an unusual topic but in it does indeed touch us because this because of this dramatic expansion I think in people's interest in having seafood in the diet we're advised that it's good for us. So certainly it's the kind of thing that touches us as consumers if not on the production end of things. Although isn't there increasing interest in the Midwest and some farmers producing fish and thanks and well that way will be and I guess that

that's an important point to make at some point here that when you think about doing aqua culture there are a couple of ways to do it. There are places along the coast of this country and I'm sure a lot of other places where what they do is essentially they construct pens in the water and they raise the fish in them but you don't have to be near the ocean to do aqua culture you could do it anywhere simply by being building as you say big tanks too to raise the fish in. Absolutely in particular the predominant form of aqua culture in the US is actually freshwater aqua culture not marine aqua culture. That's true worldwide actually as well as in the US so lots and lots of culture is in one. Just maybe we can talk a little bit about this change that I just mentioned very briefly and that is the fact that as fish stocks of wild fish stocks around the world have increasingly become depleted and demand has gone up in an effort to satisfy that demand the

industry has turned more and more to raising the fish. Can you put some numbers on that. Well I'm off work culture now supplies close to a third of all fish consumed by humans were all dried in the US it's a very important source of seafood. If you look at the top five seafood consumed in the U.S. excluding canned tuna three of them shrimp salmon and catfish come either heavily from aqua culture in the case of shrimp and salmon or entirely from aqua culture in the case of catfish. So aqua culture is an important source of seafood worldwide. Aqua culture production more than doubled in both value and by weight of production between a nineteen eighty seven and ninety seven. So you know clearly it's growing gangbusters here in the U.S. the growth rate has been considerably slower than world wide but there still has been steady growth in the industry. Some people.

But in agriculture or an aqua culture term at the fastest growing sector of U.S. agriculture though I suppose it depends on what you call a sector of U.S. agriculture but there's no there's no doubt but that it's a growing form of production. I think that it's important to realize with it aqua culture isn't just one activity it's really the production of a wide range of species in a wide range of systems and some people when they speak of aqua culture include not only farm fish and shellfish but also farm sea weed which is important in Asia much less so in the United States. A So culture facilities can vary from what are termed net tends to sap what they sound like big gnats put in in the coastal waters to raise fish like salmon to you know tanks in somebody's barn or the ponds in the southeast United States for catfish or are prepared or oyster beds in the Gulf of Mexico. Or Long Island Sound Off Connecticut and so on so that it's really a very diverse group of activities that together

make aqua culture. There are certainly environmental impacts of both of these and maybe we could talk about some of these things I guess. One of the first thing to that comes to mind is that you're raising animals and animals produce waste. Absolutely one way or another that's something that you've got to deal with and it doesn't matter. Maybe the issues are somewhat different if you're raising them in tanks. That's one thing you have to deal with that and then there sure are implications for the fact that you are raising them in the open ocean and that then that waste ends up going into the ocean ecosystem. Absolutely Well certainly people in the Midwest are quite familiar with the issues surrounding animal waste particularly from large large pot facilities. And aqua culture certainly isn't occurring at the same scale in this country at the moment to find production. But the fish to fish to produce wastes and when they're fed food is put in the water and some of it doesn't get eaten and so on so waste from fish

can be significant. At least locally. Clearly some sort of aqua culture systems are much more amenable to pollution control than others. Tank based systems you know have a clear wastewater discharge pipe and it's you know relatively easy if farmers want to or are required to to remove the nutrients in organic matter and so on from fish waste. Some of the most troublesome facilities are our net pens that are used to grow salmon which basically use the water around them. As you know the dumping ground and when the net pens are used on a small scale I'm just like many animals I put in a past year. It's probably not a big effect. I mean you know to put it crudely fish poop in the ocean anyway. But obviously as farms get larger the affects

of rice can become significant. To give an example. In the US and Canada have a significant salmon production then the main New Brunswick border on the. East Coast and on the New Brunswick side of the border a colleague of mine at the Conservation Council of New Brunswick is a marine scientist did a calculation of the human sewage equivalent of nutrients from a farmed salmon in New Brunswick and she found that farmed salmon in New Brunswick produce the amount of nitrogen and phosphorous equivalent to the amount of nitrogen and phosphorous and untreated human sewage from a city of about 100 to 200000 people. And in contrast the number of people who live in Charlotte County New Brunswick while the salmon farms are is about 30000 so cruelly salmon farms are locally the largest source of nutrients. So the effects of alcohol. It can be quite

significant on local scale and it certainly issues of Weiser some are something that some people in the industry are now addressing but a lot more needs to be done. Yeah I have been to that area and I have seen them in as you say the fish pens are very close off shore. They want them to be relatively easy for the fishermen. They have to get there to be able to feed the fish and to be able to harvest the fish so you don't want one of relatively close but also from storms. Yes and but also here well we are talking about the there has been a lot of concern about water quality in coastal areas because of concentrations of human populations. And what that does to the water there but here now we're introducing yet another sort of source of waste that might. People might although I think people might think about it a little bit differently because you say well they say it's a bunch of fish and we all would have a bunch of fish in the sea anyway so it doesn't really make very much difference that we're concentrating a large number of

fish in this relatively small place. So you could make the same argument for animals on land. We already have animals on land that I don't obviously know at some level you know having some animals in your pastor doesn't matter but when you have a confined facility with. You know thousands or tens of thousands of animals that speak in the matter. Will do. Don't don't. The regulatory bodies those that are concerned about environmental quality both the United States and Canada pay some attention to the impact that aqua culture can have on the water quality in coastal waters. Well I have to say it's somewhat uneven. Here in the United States there are absolutely no national standards under the Clean Water Act for fish farms. EPA is in the early stages of developing such standards. Now at the urging of my organization and some other organizations in the environmental community.

But oddly enough many of the fish farms in the state of Maine the salmon production facilities along the coast currently have no waste water discharge permits. And that's because basically of EPA is failure to develop any standards for such farms. Let me introduce Again our guest with us our focus 580 We're speaking with Dr. Rebecca Goldberg she is a biologist. She works for the Environmental Defense Fund She's director of EDF biotechnology program. And we're talking here about aqua culture and the environmental impact of aqua culture. Mentioned it is the international seafood industry. Within the last decade or so has been going through a major change as the natural stocks of fish have become depleted and demand has gone up. There has been a great increase in fish farming and in fact now just about all

of that catfish and trout. A lot of the shrimp a goodly amount of the salmon that people eat here in the United States all of this is raised by fish farming. Questions are certainly welcome and we have some and we'll get right to the number here in Champaign Urbana 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. Also toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. Let's take a caller here in Urbana online. One morning yes I feel an average consumer and I want to increase my use of fish in my diet. I want to avoid Mercury and I wish to be friendly to the environment and I wonder if you have any tips for the average consumer. What kinds of fish we should be consuming and what we might be avoiding. OK. I'd be more than happy to address that question

in response to interest from consumers. Several organizations including my own now have information available. Good choices and not so good choices to make when purchasing seafood mainly in the context of being environmental or ecological effects of catching or farming fish. Our website w w w dot environmental defense of our GI has lists of some of the best fish to choose and the fish that are best to avoid on environmental grounds. The National Audubon Society has a really spectacular book out now it's available to Amazon Dot Com and probably other stores. It's called the seafood lovers on ask and I highly recommend it. The Monterey Bay Aquarium on its website also has a lot of information

about choices consumers can make again in the context of environmental protection. Can you give me perhaps a list from fish they can eat that. Don't do any harm to the environment or don't give me Mercury OK. Well let me go on and talk a little bit about the issues of toxins in fish and then I can get back to to a list there is remarkably little data on the level of toxins in fish that are traded commercially. Many states and the Environmental Protection Agency have information for recreational fisherman you know fishing various types of fish out of streams and lakes and whatnot. But for marine fish coming from the ocean where FDA is responsible that

the absence of data is just stunning. It's just alarming. That said. An organization called the Environmental Working Group recently published a study called Brain Food what women should know about mercury in fish that gave some advice to consumers. And basically the study argues that women who are pregnant or might becoming women are or perhaps children. And that's the population most vulnerable to Mercury should avoid tuna in the form of steak sea bass oysters in the Gulf of Mexico. Marlin halibut PIKE Well I white Kroger and large mouth bass. My goodness. And then the report goes on to list some of the fish that maybe you shouldn't eat more than once a month. If you're at least if you're women of childbearing age or perhaps a child and not include canned tuna mahi mahi blue mussels Eastern oysters Cod pollen Great Lakes salmon blue crabs in the Gulf of Mexico wild

catfish and Lake whitefish you might notice that these species most at most of the fish that traded commercially in this country are. Marine Fish. But in these lists disproportionately appear freshwater fish. So the source of the fish and also where it is on the on the food chain fish that are top predators tend to have the most opportunity to accumulate mercury and other sorts of toxins. Those are at least two things that can help guide choices of fish. Now in terms of fish and there there are still all the things that you labeled as potentially Mercury hazards seem to be everything I would eat except perhaps gallop right on some of this. It depends on the source. For example oysters in the Gulf of Mexico are listed but not oysters from the northeast or an episodic Northwest.

But yes there are a number of fish that are apparently high in toxins. One good choice though to make is salmon from Alaska both because of the evidence that exists suggests it's relatively low in toxins and though I'm not sure that there's extensive data available and certainly on ecological grounds. The wild salmon fishery in Alaska is well managed and the salmon are abundant So they're a good choice. In contrast there are a number of ecological concerns about farmed salmon and also potentially some food safety concerns at least in in Europe and no data available from North America to speak of yet but in Europe there's been now some examination of dioxin levels in the feed a farmed salmon salmon are carnivores. They tend to eat feed so high in a fish meal and fish oil that are essentially made from ground up small fish and the feed seem to be relatively

high in dioxin. Again there's not a lot of data looking at the levels of dioxin in farmed salmon at the actual grocery store sells particularly. I don't know of any in the United States but that one really good choice to make is wild salmon from Alaska. Some other choices that you could consider. That tend to be better choices might include Alaskan pollen which. It is often and available in the form of a fish sticks. New Zealand Hokie which is also a fish stick sort of fish which is there for me please. Their last one and their New Zealand Hokie H OK. Doesn't mean that there are no issues around these fisheries at all but compared to others they tend to be a reasonable choice. If I'm catfish a reasonable choice also inexpensive farmed shellfish such as a muscle than

oysters are a reasonable choice if they come from clean water and although the way it phrased is fairly variable Fanta lobby is probably a reasonable choice to for you not to labia labia. How do you store it. Now I give you this information I want to acknowledge that you know there is a variation. You know in how any particular type of fish is cut from location to location or how it's farmed. So I'm I'm probably categorizing the fish but those are those are some types of fish that you know I buy to feed my family. And you mentioned Alaskan Pollard he said. P o l l k l k. Yes there are some issues with Pollack. Environmentally in that at least a little bit of the

nearshore fishery seems to take polyps that are also important in the diets of Stellar sea lions which are endangered species and there's controversy about that aspect of the Pollock fishery. On the other hand Pollak are relatively abundant through most of their range. So anyway that said well I thank you so much for I think you do look at the websites and at for information. OK let's go on to another caller here that will be line number two. That are better. Well good morning i hope this isn't a repetition and part of what the first caller had mentioned. But I understand from some people and I hope you can clarify this that as with farm raised you know livestock with the fish populations a lot of

antibiotics etc. are used in the especially in shrimp farming. Is that the case with shrimp and is it the case with other animals that are farmed. And also question any substance to the touch and that with regard to the food that's given to farm animals ground up fish and so forth. Could you please comment on the possible sources of you know pollution things that go a lot of people that are into the organic movements are very much concerned about. Thank you. OK those are good questions. Too. Start with the antibiotic issue. There are real concerns about antibiotic use in fish farming. There is no strong evidence that there is heavy antibiotic use in the U.S. Fish farming

although there isn't much or really any data I should say. Well not much data available on how much antibiotics are actually used. But unlike production of pigs and chickens and cows in this country where at a biopics are routinely fed to these animals. As growth promoters I mean they're fed to healthy animals on a daily basis. That sort of use of antibiotic is illegal in this country for fish production. So compared to the way much of the meat is produced in this country particularly picking the chickens and pigs in factory farmed fish is actually a better choice in terms of antibiotics. If it comes from the U.S. on the other hand the practices abroad may not be so great. I have been told anecdotally by someone who work in Chile that Chilean salmon farming and most farm salmon in this country comes and she lay or at least that she lies the biggest

export. The largest source of imported farmed salmon to this country anyway Chile is the heavy use of antibiotics in salmon production. They're certainly historically been a lot of antibiotic use in shrimp farming in Asia. So so certainly antibiotic use in aqua culture is an issue primarily abroad. A lot of our seafood does come from abroad particularly virtually all of the farm simply would get most of the farmed salmon. So antibiotic use can be an issue particularly troubling to me at the moment is that the Food and Drug Administration is at the moment not sampling for antibiotic residues in any imported farmed fish. So the Food and Drug Administration surveillance of antibiotic residues in farm fish has always been pretty scant at the moment. It's nonexistent. On to your second question about the use of fish to

feed fish this is a huge issue for aqua culture. One of the ironies of awkward culture is that it's often promoted as a means to supplement world. Fish surprise and some people go so far as to argue that aqua culture may actually even take some of the pressure off marine fisheries by providing an alternative source. In fact many forms of aqua culture particularly culture that used to produce fish for people in industrialized countries like the U.S. focuses on the production of fish that are carnivores in the wild like salmon or that are typically when they're farm given diets that are essentially carnivorous like the diets of farm shrimp. And the diets of these fish are high in fish meal and fish oil that are made from small fish that for the most part are caught expressly for the purpose of making fish meal and fish oil for

animal feed. So for many types of farmed fish it actually takes more fish caught from the ocean to produce a pound of farm fish. When you get out at the end if that makes sense for example it takes two to three pounds of loud cut fish in the form of fish meal to produce a pound of farmed salmon. The cell route that may make economic sense and that's not very valuable. Well the fish are caught to raise much more economically valuable foreign fish ecologically. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me and certainly to the degree that people are interested in using software culture to supplement marine resources. We should be farming the types of fish that actually require huge inputs of resources. Very good. I had one for the question.

There's a moment at the Specifically you're listing types of fish that were. Relatively safe. I don't use that term here. The orange roughy from Australia fall into the category of a farm fish or ocean fish and orange roughy is entirely wild caught. I would not recommend eating orange roughy based on ecological grounds. Orange roughy are a deep ocean fish live in very cold water they grow very slowly and orange roughy you buy in the supermarket may be as old as your grandmother. And they are they have been over exploited orange roughy became popular you know I don't know a decade or so ago and that became a huge fishery for them and these fish just can't reproduce at a rate to sustain more than a low level catch I don't know specifically about the management of the orange roughy fishery in

Australia vs. in other countries but as a rule I don't buy it. Thank you very much thinks we are a little bit past agreement why here again our guest for this hour of focus 580 is Dr. Rebecca Goldberg she is a biologist with the Environmental Defense Fund. We're talking about some of the environmental impact of fish farming. Aqua culture. Now more and more of the fish that we have available to us in supermarkets and fish markets here in this country and other places as well is farm raised more talk about some of the implications of this trend. Your questions are welcome 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 we also have a toll free line good anywhere that you can hear us that's 800 to 2 2 or 9 4 5 5. I'm also looking here at one of these lists of fish good choices ones that you suggest we avoid on the EDF website and this I think is just based on issues of say environmental impact sustainability and for and there are number of fish here that on this list that I know are available here in Champaign

Urbana and I'm I'm thinking about. You know what it why it is that some are good and some are bad. And for example on the list of ones that are good to choose one of the fish is to labia and on the ones to avoid you're suggesting people avoid farmed salmon. And I know and I know personally I like salmon a lot a lot of the same and we get here I'm sure is farmed is that pretty much the issue of the one thing that we were just talking about the fact that tilapia is they're herbivores and salmon are carnivores and that's the the difference in how they're produced. Well that is certainly one factor although top you want me to diet that's relatively high in fish meal and actually the diets of commercially produced copy are somewhat variable. But there are other concerns about salmon production in addition. One of them we talked about earlier salmon are produced in what are termed net pens in coastal bays and estuaries that basically have no pollution

control of any sort. The coastal waters just go through the same in that sense leaving out the waste. Besides the water pollution from the salmon farms being an issue there is perhaps an even bigger issue with what's termed biological pollution from salmon farms. The net pens in coastal waters are very prone to breakage to terrorists in storms or because of human error are because seals try and get at the salmon in the pens. And. There are often large scale escapes of farmed salmon that's become a big issue both on the east and the West Coast of this country and of Canada virtually all the salmon that are farmed are Atlantica salmon which aren't native to the Atlantic Ocean yet so many salmon have now escaped from Washington State and British Columbia salmon farms that there are now Atlantic salmon producing on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. And that's the

considerable concern about what that means for the competition of Atlantic salmon with the native Pacific salmon species some of which are in the lower down in the Pacific Northwest than Alaska for the South Alaska. Some of the fisheries are in trouble. So. That's a great concern on the East Coast. There are now so few wild Atlantic salmon left in Maine that last November the federal government listed the remaining runs of wild Atlantic salmon under the Endangered Species Act as endangered species. And one of the major impediments that has been a dent defied by the National Marine Fishery Service to the restoration of wild Atlantica salmon populations the escaped farmed salmon which in many cases outnumber the routes. Salmon will interbreed with the wild Atlantic salmon and as a result and. Killing the wild with with hybrids between cultivated and wild salmon which

are genetically less fit or genetically less well adapted to main rivers than the wild salmon. So in both cases you're looking at. The kind of problems that come along with an introduced species. Absolutely. And it issues to do with introduced species you know occur for all sorts of farmed fish but for salmon the issues have been particularly acute. I'm in large part because there are such large scale escapes of salmon from salmon that pen for example there was a scape of salmon from a net pens and may not last winter of about 100000 fish. Norway which has the world's largest salmon farming industry through the mid 1990s was losing about a million fish a year from salmon at 10 so we're not just talking about the occasional escape of a fish or two but really some very large scale events. Let's go and get back to the phones here some calling from the western suburbs of

Chicago here. Line number for hello hello. Yes I'm glad to hear this. I'd like to ask what about Dory Fish N D U R Y grin a dear to you and I'm kicking and farting. I don't know what a granite ear is my I have a limited understanding of Oreo dory but I believe that it's also cold water fish from the sub-Antarctic waters sort of like orange roughy. So with cold water not good. Well no it means the fish can grow very slowly and I I believe that or there are some problems with overfishing of Oreo Dori But again it's not something I'm terrifically knowledgeable about and then you asked about canned sardine they are starving. Yeah they're fresh right on the head. I think that sardines that ecologically are a good choice. A starting population certainly rebound very quickly they're not particularly

long life fish. So logically I think they're fine I have never seen any data on toxins in sardines I would assume that since they're relatively. On the food chain in the ocean that they tend to be somewhat lower in toxins but again you know it's bad. It's about the fact that we don't know about a lot of what may or may not be and various types of fish from around the world. But you could hear and tuner ears have a lot of mercury or. Well canned tuna has some actually fresh tuna is often regarded as higher. A bigger source of Marc Cherry and I'm I'm here reporting on a report by an organization called the Environmental Working Group. My understanding is that the tuna canning industry does do make some effort to limit the levels of

mercury in canned tuna. Nevertheless tuna is top of the food chain fish and more prone to having mercury in it than fish that are lower and on the food chain. As you go up the food chain you know big fish eat little fish eat fish to take it down the food chain. You know there are fewer steps between what was eaten and plants that are at the bottom of the food chain or algae. And there's less opportunity for a low food chain fish to what's called a bio accumulate toxins than there is for a top of the food chain fish. And Kermit. Hide it land to come. Remain in deep trouble ecologically they've been severely overfished in the past. There is now an effort to rebuild the cod stock. But it's not their cut of not really rebounded yet. The

more over another issue something we haven't talked about is how fish are hot. As we think about the ecological consequences of fishing certainly one thing to be concerned about is how well is the stock managed. Is it fish that levels that make the stock sustainable or is it over fish so that the stock the cotton and eventually as in the case of the cod even collapses a separate issue is that some of the fishing gear that is a used to catch fish actually is ecologically destructive on its own. And like a number of other types of fish is caught with trawl that scrape along the bottom of the ocean not only catch cod but other fish that are in the past. Plus a deer scrapes around along the bottom of the ocean. It stirs up. The basically the sand or whatever substrate is at the bottom of the ocean killing the critters that are in that

and can actually physically over years and areas will be trialled over and over and over literally change the parents at the bottom of the ocean and and the structures at the bottom of the ocean so trawling is widely regarded as ecologically destructive and Connor for the most part trawling gear. There is one neat group of fishermen on Cape Cod called the Cape Cod commercial hook fisherman's Association which is now catching cod with hooks and lines. They found that actually by avoiding trials by catching cod with hooks and lines they can bring in fish that don't get battered as they do in tall nets they can even bring in live fish and they can fetch a higher price for cod in the market. And now they're doing they're doing something terrific. You can buy their fish if you're in New England but I doubt it in Champaign-Urbana. But the point I want to reinforce is is that there are a number of factors that go into the

ecological effects of fishing and in some cases the gear is terribly destructive I would argue that we tolerate destruction in fishing. That would be unthinkable in land. I have a colleague another environmental organization who compares trialling to not just cutting down trees but scooping up a lot of the soil around the trees too. When you live we wouldn't tolerate that on land but we tolerate it under this sea where people never see what goes on. So I wasn't quite you said why oh why. I mean how do we know this will work. We are in the counter doesn't know anything right. Well certainly when you go into a restaurant all you can do is ask and you cook may or may not have the information. Many supermarkets though do post information about the source of the fish that they have at the seafood counter. And if it's not posted ask you know I do and what so what would you suggest is the best thing

to shop for. Well as I had earlier there are some I did hear earlier I'm a little confused about the shrimp shellfish and the famine I know you said Wild wild salmon from Alaska are a terrific choice for a lobby it is a reasonable choice of the production facilities vary but it's certainly a fish I buy for my children. Catfish which are in the farm raised calf issues are a reasonable choice. They're quite inexpensive. Other choices you might consider include a farm shellfish such as mollusks or oysters for using five muscle all muscle. Yeah or oysters. If you are a farmer a crayfish as a good choice herring I think you are a reasonable

choice ecologically mahi mahi or dolphin fish is a good choice of though there is some evidence of at least some summer curing contamination and I but certainly to eat it occasionally I don't think it is problematic. It's hard to give advice on a kind of shrimp that that's really good ecologically. There are a lot of problems with shrimp farming which is almost entirely in developing countries and in many places from pharmacy been sited in mangrove forests and other wetlands and come in in a big ecological costs. On the other hand shrimp fishing most of it involves trawling along the bottom which is just. Potentially destructive to the bottom of the ocean. And in addition the shrimp fishery has the highest what's called bycatch or by kill rate of any fishery worldwide by catch is the. Taking of fish beside someone you want to catch

and most buy catch comes on board fishing vessel dead and is dumped overboard so it's essentially killing critters that sort of needlessly going there he said the shrimp fishery worldwide the bycatch rate is about five to one in other words about five pounds of marine life are killed for every pound of shrimp that's brought in. So for the most part I don't feel like I can advise people that shrimp are ecologically a good choice. There is on the West Coast and in northern waters and on the East Coast. Some small alternative shrimp fisheries shrimp fishery and main trap cut what are called Spot fronts on the West Coast that don't have bycatch problems but those shrimp are hard to get particularly if you live outside those areas and farm raised a laugh and have good. No no no no no no no. I really suggest the listeners actually get.

Go on the web. I don't have access. Who died so that they can have information in front of them. There is no salmon farming in Alaska. The salmon that come from Alaska are riled it's an extremely abundant fishery. I think people can consumers can feel good about Alaskan salmon. There is. Some evidence that the feed that is used to produce farmed salmon at least in Europe is sometimes contaminated with dioxins. There's a lot going on to examine that issue. But between that and to my mind even more important ecological concerns about salmon farming. As a consumer I always choose wild salmon from Alaska over farmed salmon. And virtually any salmon that you see in the store that says Atlantic salmon

is going to be farmed. And that's because the virtually no wild and sick salmon left certainly not enough to support big commercial fisheries. And Atlantic salmon is the primary species used for farming salmon. So you know the cryptic way to think about it is wild salmon from Alaska are good and virtually all about salmon we get in this country is from a lot of farmed Atlantic salmon are not so good. We're almost out of time. There's one point I want to raise real quick. There has been a lot of concern in the past few years in livestock about diseases called transmissible spongiform encephalopathy BSE is one commonly called Mad Cow and the concern was that that the disease got into the cows because we were feeding them other. And so we said here in this country I believe as my understanding we said when we stop that practice when

livestock production we weren't going to feed one animal to another now here we feed ruminants. OK so that's the chickens right. Yes indeed right because there the thought is that it's not there's there's nothing that the chickens could have that then the right chicken the exact So if it's sheep and cows there I don't want to be fed ground up animals. But on that same sort of issue here if we're talking about some farm raised fish being fed other fish ground fish I don't and I also don't want to invent a problem that doesn't exist but is there any concern that there might be some possibility of transmission of disease in that way. Well at the moment I don't know of any compelling evidence that there is a problem. That said the science of these transmissible spongiform encephalopathy which are caused by little proteins called prion is incredibly new and scientists are just beginning to understand the issues. So whether we'll

find a problem in the future. I have no idea. Well before we go Also you did mention the fact that your organization other organizations have been for me. That like we've been discussing here on the web there may be some people listening to us who don't have web access. Is there something that they can get some printed material they can get by writing to us. Sure people listeners can get information from Environmental Defense by by writing to us right to environmental defense at 1875 Connecticut Avenue Northwest Washington D.C. 2 0 0 0 9. And I'm sure you can get a copy of our list. That's on the web. The National Audubon Society. That's living Oceans Program in Islip New York Islip of IP also has information that can be mailed out unfortunately I don't have that address with

me. OK well I'm sure that that's something we can come up with or people should be able to to get that fairly easily the Audubon Society. Well we're going to have to leave it at that my biology's we got some people we can't take but that is it for the time that we have and again I want to thank you Dr. Goldberg for talking with us. Okay well thank you very much. Our guest Dr. Rebecca Goldberg She's a biologist in the New York office of the Environmental Defense Fund. She's also director of the biotechnology program.