Featured Image Credit: REUTERS / Ivan Alvarado via Newsweek
By Katharine Rose Fielding
For people who care about conservation, making choices about where our food comes from can a times be a bit stressful.
Ideally, everyone in the world would eat only plant-based, locally grown, sustainable, pesticide-free food. But the reality is, that eating right for the environment isn’t always as convenient, which is a huge deterrents for many people. As people, we like easy. Very easy.
Still, many are at least now doing research in order to choose more sustainable meals. With well-publicized reports about overfishing and plummeting sea life populations, many people are starting to opt for buying farm-raised fish.
If it’s not caught in the wild, but raised strictly for human consumption, that’s better right? Well…not necessarily.
Photo Credit: Source
A new report published in April 2016, shows that along with better-known problems in aquaculture, there’s something else we should be aware of when purchasing our salmon filets at the store.
We are causing fish to go deaf.
The study, conducted by University of Melbourne graduate student Torrey Reimer, found that nearly half of the world’s farmed fish suffer from hearing impairments.
Reimer and her team studied wild and farmed salmon from Norway, Australia, Scotland, Canada, and Chile, and got similar startling results each time: hatchery-raised fish were ten times more likely than wild fish to have deformed otoliths, small calcium carbonate structures inside their ears.
Which begs the question…who cares? With the wide assortment of environmental, social, and political issues we are bombarded with, why does it matter if a few fish are now as hard of hearing as your grandpa?
Well, for starters, it’s more that just a few fish. There are over one billion individual salmon farmed and harvested each year. That means that about 500 million of those fish will have deformed otoliths and associated hearing loss.
Photo Credit: Source
But again, who cares? Fish aren’t exactly as charismatic as their mammalian food counterparts like cows and pigs, which is why many people don’t have a problem with eating or farming them.
However, aside from causing them pain, the deformities can have a disastrous effect on a fish’s ability to find food, escape from predators, and navigate their way around the water.
While some of those problems aren’t as prevalent in a farmed environment, people have also been experimenting with releasing farm-raised fish back into the wild to boost wild populations.
This has been going very poorly, and this study finally sheds light on a possible cause – released fish with hearing loss wouldn’t be able to survive out in the open ocean very well.
The exact cause of the ear deformities isn’t known yet. It will take more years of studies and research to draw any conclusions there.
But, hopefully this knowledge will help create healthier fish farming environments that will benefit both the individual fish and their populations as a whole….and will help ease our guilt a little next time we’re in the seafood department of the grocery store.