Conservation Aquaculture

Stocking hatchery-produced fish has been a standard component of fisheries management for over 100 years. This book discusses the production of hatchery fish used in aquaculture-assisted fisheries programs to help stabilize and recover endangered species. For the most part, these programs have been unsuccessful, and a reason why is that the traditional approach to fish culture produces fish that are genetically and behaviorally ill-suited to help recover an imperiled species. The hatchery environment and management used to culture the fish makes them sub-viable in the wild. Even if most of the augmented fish die, survivors that mate with wild fish lower the fitness of the endangered population, making the conservation program counter-productive.