China Wants to Restore the Sea With High-Tech Marine Ranches
China wants to restore the sea with high-tech marine ranches:
Developing nations have historically faced a trade-off between plundering marine resources for development and protecting ecosystems for future generations, says Cao Ling, a professor at Xiamen University in eastern China. When growing countries take more than natural ecosystems can replenish, measures like seasonal fishing bans have been the traditional way to allow fisheries to recover. Marine ranching offers an alternative to restricting fishing-a way to "really synergize environmental, economic, and social development goals," says Cao-by actively increasing the ocean's bounty.
It's now a "hot topic" in China, says Cao, who grew up on her family's fish farm before conducting research at the University of Michigan and Stanford. In fact, "marine ranching" has become such a buzzword that it can be hard to tell what it actually means, encompassing as it does flagship facilities like Genghai No.1 (which merge scientific research with industrial-scale aquaculture pens, recreational fishing amenities, and offshore power) and a baffling array of structures including deep-sea floating wind farms with massive fish-farming cages and 100,000-ton "mobile marine ranches"-effectively fish-breeding aircraft carriers. There are even whole islands, like the butterfly-shaped Wuzhizhou on China's tropical south coast, that have been designated as ranching areas.
To understand what a marine ranch is, it's easiest to come back to the practice's roots. In the early 1970s, California, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska passed laws to allow construction of facilities aimed at repairing stocks of salmon after the rivers where they traditionally bred had been decimated by pollution and hydroelectric dams. The idea was essentially twofold: to breed fish in captivity and to introduce them into safe nurseries in the Pacific. Since 1974, when the first marine ranches in the US were built off the coast of California and Oregon, ranchers have constructed artificial habitats, usually concrete reef structures, that proponents hoped could provide nursery grounds where both valuable commercial stocks and endangered marine species could be restored.
Today, fish farming is a $200 billion industry that has had a catastrophic environmental impact, blighting coastal waters with streams of fish feces, pathogens, and parasites.
Marine ranching has rarely come close to fulfilling this potential. Eight of the 11 ranches that opened in the US in the 1970s were reportedly shuttered by 1990, their private investors having struggled to turn a profit. Meanwhile, European nations like Norway spent big on attempts to restock commercially valuable species like cod before abandoning the efforts because so few introduced fish survived in the wild. Japan, which has more ranches than any other country, made big profits with scallop ranching. But a long-term analysis of Japan's policies estimated that all other schemes involving restocking the ocean were unprofitable. Worse, it found, releasing docile, lab-bred fish into the wild could introduce genetically damaging traits into the original population.
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