China is the world’s top fish consumer and is spending billions on technology designed to restock the oceans. But will this expensive experiment actually work?
Just a short ferry ride from the port city of Yantai on China’s northeast coast lies Genghai No. 1, a ring of metal platforms similar to 12,000-ton oil rigs, billed as a hotel and entertainment complex. Dock and board an offshore facility, part cruise ship, part high-tech laboratory, all laid out on some 800 meters of floating walkways. Their focus: the “shining diamond” in the sky of Genghai. The number one collar, according to China’s official news firm, is a seven-story guest center, designed to look like a cartoon starfish.
Jack Klumpp, a YouTuber from Florida, has become one of the first 20,000 tourists to explore the Genghai Visitor Center after it opens in May 2023. In his series I’m in China with Jack, Klumpp walks through a pond of Magnificently decorated Fisher-Price. park. yellow and turquoise, and inside, he is excited to see the hull of the Chinese submersible Jiaolong. In reality, the sea here is only about ten meters deep and the submersible is only a model. Your adventure into the depths of the ocean is an immersive virtual experience rather than a real adventure, yet the back of the submarine falls over and shakes under your feet like a merry-go-round at a theme park.
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Watching Klumpp at Genghai’s sumptuous marine hotel, it’s hard to understand why anyone would simply build this resort charm on an offshore platform about a mile across the Bohai Strait. But the answer lies at the other end of the alley at the Genghai Tourist Center, where, on a smaller, more comfortable platform, he learned to throw a parasite rope over the edge and reel in a giant sea bream.
Genghai is a rare tourist destination, where 200,000 “high-quality marine fish” breed every year, according to a recent China Daily interview with Jin Haifeng, deputy general manager of Genghai Technology Company, a subsidiary of the state-owned company. Only a handful of them are caught by recreational fishermen like Klumpp. The vast majority are dumped into the ocean in a procedure known as marine farming.
Since 2015, China has built 169 “national demonstration ranches” – adding Genghai No. 1 – and dozens of smaller-scale facilities, which together have laid down 67 million cubic meters of synthetic reefs and planted seagrass beds. in an area across Manhattan, simultaneously releasing at least 167 billion juvenile fish and shellfish into the ocean.
The Chinese government sees these scenarios as pressure and a reaction to the stark reality of the collapse of fisheries in China and around the world, with catches off China’s coasts declining by 18% in less than a decade. In the face of this decline, marine farms may be offering a win-win solution: a way to repair wild marine ecosystems while also increasing fish catches.
Genghai, which is called “Sea Harvest,” sits atop what Jin calls an “underwater ecological oasis” built by developers. In the middle of the circular walkway, synthetic marine habitats are home to shrimp, algae and fish, in addition to the googly-eyed Korean rockfish and a parrot-like beaked fish known as the spotted knife.
The facility is a next-generation showcase for the country’s ambitious plans, which call for 200 pilot projects by 2025. It’s a 5G-enabled, AI-equipped “ecological” ranch that features submarine robots for underwater patrols and “intelligent breeding cages” that collect environmental data in near-real time to optimize breeding by, for example, feeding fish automatically.
In an article published by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, China’s top science institute, one high-ranking fisheries expert sketches out plans for a seductive tech-driven future where production and conservation go hand in hand: Ecological ranches ring the coastline, seagrass meadows and coral reefs regrow around them, and autonomous robots sustainably harvest mature seafood.
But according to Chinese researchers, now is the time to take stock of the lessons learned so far thanks to the immediate deployment of livestock farming. Before the country invests billions of dollars more in similar projects in the coming years, it will have to show that it can lay the necessary foundations.
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 his family’s fish farm before pursuing studies at the University of Michigan and Stanford. In fact, “marine farming” has become a buzzword that can be difficult to understand. say what it means, encompassing flagship services such as Genghai No. 1 (which combines clinical studies with industrial-scale aquaculture pens, recreational fishing services and marine energy) and a bewildering array of structures, including floating offshore wind farms. with huge fish cages and 100,000-ton “mobile marine ranches”, actually fish transporters. There are even entire islands, such as the butterfly-shaped Wuzhizhou off China’s tropical southern coast, that have been designated as breeding grounds.
To understand what a marine ranch is, it’s easier to go back to the roots of the practice. In the early 1970s, California, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska passed laws allowing the creation of facilities to rebuild salmon populations after the rivers where they were found. Fish that historically spawned were decimated by pollutants and hydroelectric dams. The concept was necessarily twofold: to breed fish in captivity and to introduce them into hatcheries in the Pacific. Since 1974, when the first marine fish ranches in the United States were built off the coasts of California and Oregon, ranchers have built man-made habitats, usually concrete reef structures, that proponents hoped could provide breeding spaces where valuable advertising reserves and endangered marine species could be housed. . Restored.
Today, fish farming costs $200 billion and has had a catastrophic environmental impact, devastating coastal waters with floods of fish excrement, pathogens and parasites.
Marine agriculture has rarely managed to tap into this potential. Reportedly, eight of the 11 ranches opened in the United States in the 1970s were closed in 1990 as their personal investors struggled to turn a profit. Meanwhile, European countries like Norway have spent a lot of cash. seeking to repopulate commercially valuable species such as cod before abandoning their efforts because very few fish brought in have survived in the wild. Japan, which has more ranches than any other country, has made huge profits from scallop farming. But a long-term investigation of Japanese policies found that all other projects involving restocking the oceans were profitable. Worse, releasing docile lab-bred fish into the wild may simply introduce genetically harmful characteristics into the original population.
Today, marine aquaculture is considered a strange branch of traditional fish farming, in which fish of a single species are intensively fed in small, closed enclosures. This type of feedlot aquaculture has evolved enormously over the last part of the century. $200 billion industry that has had a catastrophic environmental impact, devastating coastal waters with floods of fish excrement, pathogens and parasites.
However, coastal countries have not been discouraged by the poor effects of marine agriculture. Many governments, especially in East Asia, see the release of millions of young fish as a cheap way to show off to hard-hit fishing communities, whose livelihoods are disappearing as fisheries near collapse. At least 20 countries continue to experiment with various combinations of repopulation and habitat improvement, joining efforts to transplant corals, reforest mangroves and plant seagrass beds.
Each year, at least 26 billion juvenile fish and shellfish, from 180 species, are intentionally released into the world’s oceans, or 3 for every user on the planet. Together, those efforts constitute a vast, little-noticed ongoing experiment in the wild marine biome.
China, with a population of 1. 4 billion, is the world’s undisputed fishing superpower, home to the largest fishing fleet and more than part of the planet’s fish farms. The country also surpasses all other countries in fish consumption, eating as much as the next 4 largest consumers: the United States, the European Union, Japan and India, combined, and then doubled. But decades of overfishing, compounded by rampant polluters from industry and marine aquaculture, have depleted coastal fisheries.
In many Chinese coastal cities like Yantai, there’s a sense that things “couldn’t get worse,” says Yong Chen, a professor at Stony Brook University in New York. In the temperate fishing areas of northern Bohai and the Yellow Sea, populations of wild fish such as the critically endangered yellow croaker have been declining since the 1980s. By the turn of the millennium, the whole of Bohai, a densely populated gulf located 160 kilometers east of Beijing, had lost most of its giant sea bass and croaker, leaving fishing communities to “fish” along the food chain. Fishing nets have become 91 percent lighter than in the 1950s, largely because this region’s heavy industry and petrochemical plants had polluted the waters too much for healthy fish populations.
As a result, over the past three decades, China has instituted some of the strictest seasonal fishing bans in the world; Recently he even encouraged fishermen to do other work. But fish stocks continue to decline, and fishing communities worry about their future.
Marine farming has gained tremendous momentum from the highest levels of government; is an ideal test case for President Xi Jinping’s “ecological civilization” agenda, a strategy for long-term environmentally sustainable growth. Since 2015, livestock farming has been enshrined in successive Five-Year Plans, the country’s highest-level planning documents, and the livestock farming structure has been subsidized through an initial investment of 11. 9 billion yen ($1. 8 billion). . China is now on track to release 30 billion juvenile fish and shellfish annually until 2025.
The country has signaled that it is willing to fight back even harder, in a way that could inflict serious economic damage on its biggest economic rival.
Until now, this practice has given rise to an unlikely model: the sea cucumber. It is a thorny animal that lives on the seabed and, like Japanese scallops, does not stray far from the release sites and requires little effort to be captured by herders. In northern China, sea cucumbers are incredibly valuable. They are one of the most beloved dishes on Yantai menus, where they are served chopped and braised with green onions.
Some ranches have experimented with breeding species, adding successful fish such as sea bass and shellfish such as shrimp and scallops, as well as cucumber, which feeds on the waste produced by other species. In northern China, such as Bohai, where the most sensible priority is to help fishing communities recover, “a very popular [mix] is sea cucumber, abalone and sea urchin,” says Tian Tao, director of clinical studies at the Liaoning Marine Breeding Engineering Center. and Scientific Research at Dalian Ocean University.
Today, most farms aim to increase fish catches and have done little to deliver on their green promises. According to Yang Hongsheng, a leading marine scientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the combination of species obtained so far is “too simple” to produce a solid ecosystem, and the promoters of the farms did not pay “adequate attention” to this goal.
The marine ranch structure is funded by subsidies of around 20 million yen ($2. 8 million) from the Chinese government, but the ranches are operated through personal corporations. These corporations earn income through the generation of seafood, but increasingly they grow other resources. such as tourism and recreational fishing, which have boomed in recent years. So far, this owner-operator style has created little incentive to look beyond tried-and-true strategies that look a lot like aquaculture, like Genghai No. 1’s closed deep-sea fishing cages, and has done little to inspire contributions. to the ocean’s fitness beyond the ranch’s footprint. “Many corporations simply need to get cash from the government,” says Zhongxin Wu, an associate professor at Dalian Ocean University who works with Tian Tao.
Making ranches more sustainable and eco-friendly will require an immediate expansion of fundamental knowledge about understudied marine species, says Stony Brook’s Yong Chen. “For a sea cucumber, the first thing you want to know is its life cycle, right? How they reproduce, how they live, how they die,” he says. “For many key marine species, we have little idea about the temperature or the situations in which they prefer to reproduce and grow.
Chinese universities are world leaders in implemented science, from agricultural studies to tissue science. But answering basic questions is rarely very simple in China’s “very unique” study and progression environment, says Neil Loneragan, president of the Malaysia-based Asian Fisheries Society and a professor. emeritus of marine sciences from Murdoch University in Australia.
According to Loneragan, the central government’s dominant influence over livestock progress means that researchers have to walk a tightrope between their two bosses: the university principal and the party leader. Marine biologists need to understand the basics, “but researchers would need to do so in a way that demonstrates the economic benefits to the industry and therefore the investment benefits to the government,” he says.
Many efforts are aimed at addressing known disorders in the life cycle of captive-bred fish, such as insufficient reproduction rates or the low survival chances of young fish when they succeed in the ocean. Studies have shown that fish in those early stages of life are vulnerable to environmental fluctuations such as storms and recent ocean heat waves.
One of the most radical solutions, which Zhongxin Wu is testing, would improve their fitness before they’re released from breeding tanks into the wild. Currently, Wu says, fish are simply scooped up in oxygenated plastic bags and turned loose in ocean nurseries, but there it becomes apparent that many are weak or lacking in survival skills. In response, his team is developing a set of “wild training” tools. “The main method is swimming training,” he says. In effect, the juvenile fish are forced to swim against a current, on a sort of aquatic treadmill, to help acclimate them to the demands of the wild. Another technique, he says, involves changing the water temperature and introducing some other species to prepare them for seagrass and kelp forests they’ll meet in the world outside.
Wu says that greater habitat improvement strategies have greater potential to increase the potential of marine agriculture. Today, most ranches create underwater environments by employing prefabricated concrete structures installed under 20 meters of water, with a rough surface to stimulate coral or algae growth. The Chinese ranch aspires to 30,000 cubic meters of synthetic reefs; in the conservation-focused breeding domain around Wuzhizhou Island, for example, 1,000 poured concrete reef structures were placed around the tropical island’s coast. Fish stocks have increased tenfold in the last decade.
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This is by far the most valuable component of the Chinese livestock program. According to a national assessment co-authored with Cao Ling, 87% of China’s first $1 billion in investment was spent on building synthetic reefs, and another 5% was spent on seagrass and algae restoration. These costs have raised questions about the effectiveness of efforts and the dynamics of innovation. Across China, there are early signs that innovations are making a difference: sites with synthetic reefs have been found to have a richer mix of commercially vital species and higher biomass than adjacent sites. But Tian and Wu are investigating new approaches, adding traditional 3D-printed structures for endangered fish. Bungalow-sized metal ziggurats with wide openings were tested for yellowtail kingfish (a giant predatory fish popular for sashimi) and barrel-vaulted, waist-high concrete arches for sea cucumbers. In recent years, pyramid-shaped structures have been specially designed to divert ocean currents into ocean “currents. ” Nutrients that settle on the seabed are expelled to the surface. “It attracts prey for the smartest predators,” says Loneragan, adding species like giant tuna that command top prices in restaurants.
So will China soon be relying on marine ranches to restock the seas? We still don’t have anywhere near enough data to say. The Qingdao Marine Conservation Society, an environmental NGO, is one of the few independent organizations systematically assessing ranches’ track records and has, says founder Songlin Wang, “failed to find sufficient independent and science-based research results that can measurably verify most marine ranches’ expected or claimed environmental and social benefits.”
One answer to the lack of knowledge may simply be the kind of new generation on display at Genghai No. 1, where robotic patrols and underwater sensors promptly feed a huge dashboard that measures water quality, changes in the ocean environment and the behavior of fish. After decades of being a relatively low-tech enterprise, livestock farming in China has embraced those new technologies since the start of the latest five-year plan in 2021. The inventions promise efficiency, lowering prices and making ranches more resilient to fluctuations. climatic. . and herbal disasters, according to the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
But Yong Chen, whose lab at Stony Brook partners with Chinese researchers, is skeptical that researchers are gathering and sharing the right data. “The problem is, yes, there’s this visualization. So what?” he says. “[Marine ranching companies] are willing to invest money into this kind of infrastructure, create that kind of big screen, and people will walk in and say ‘Wow, look at that!’” he adds. “Yeah, it’s beautiful. It definitely will impress the leadership. Important people will give you money for that. But as a scientist, my question to you is: How can it help you inform your decision-making process next year?”
Will China soon be relying on marine ranches to restock the seas? We still don’t have anywhere near enough data to say.
“Data sharing is complicated in China,” explains Cao Ling. Most of the knowledge produced through personal corporations remains on their servers. But Cao and Chen say governments – local or central – could simply facilitate a more open exchange of knowledge in order to guide ranch design and policies.
But the Chinese central government is convinced by what it has observed and is expanding its investments. Tian, who heads the government committee on marine agriculture, says he recently learned that the next 10-year plan will aim to increase the number of pilot farms. from two hundred to 350 until 2035. Each of them is expected to receive a subsidy of two hundred million yen ($28 million), 10 times the existing typical investment. Specific policies will be announced next year, but he hopes the ranches will no longer be funded as stand-alone facilities. Instead, subsidies will most likely be given to cities like Dalian and Yantai, which can plan on land and sea and localize tactics to link advertising fishing with power generation and tourism while reducing advertising pollution.
Tian has an illustration that aims to visualize the coming tech-driven ecological ranching system, a sort of “marine ranching 3.0”: a sea cove monitored by satellites and restored to such good health that orcas have returned to its fish-filled waters. It’s a near-utopian image seemingly ripped from a 1960s issue of Popular Science. There’s even stranger research that aims to see if red sea bream like the one Jack Klumpp caught can be conditioned like Pavlov’s dogs—in this case to flock to the sound of a horn, so the ocean’s harvest would literally swim into nets at the press of a button.
So far China’s marine ranching program remains far from any of this, despite the isolated signs of success. But ultimately what matters most is to find a “balance point” between commerce and sustainability, says Cao. Take Genghai No. 1: “It’s very pretty!” she says with a laugh. “And it costs a lot for the initial investment.” If such ranches are going to contribute to China’s coming “ecological civilization,” they’ll have to prove they are delivering real gains and not just sinking more resources into a dying ocean.
Matthew Ponsford is a freelance journalist in London.
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