Regulators in Hawaii have recently approved a startup company in Honolulu's plan to begin building the first tuna farm in the nation off of the waters near the Big Island.
The company, known as Hawaii Oceanic Technology, is aiming to create an open ocean farm that is environmentally friendly and provides development of big eye tuna, which is a favorite source of fish used in sashimi and sushi, but big eye tuna are overfished. This project is also going to create the first commercially run big eye farm in the world.
The Board of Land and Natural Resources in the state voted 4 against 1 to give the company permission to begin installation of three underwater cages to house the tuna.
One of the board members that voted in favor of the project, John Morgan said that he is concerned on a worldwide level as well as a local level that there is severe overfishing going on that absolutely has to be remedied.
Unlike many of the tuna farms located throughout the world that capture tuna in their immature stages and then fatten them up prior to harvesting, the goal behind Hawaii Oceanic is going to be to hatch big eye tuna artificially at a lab at the University of Hawaii in Hilo.
After the fry are grown, the company is going to take these fish to the giant ocean pens, which will be located at about 3 miles away from shore, and the tuna will be grown here until they reach roughly 100lbs in size.
The company is expecting to be able to avoid the tuna disease problems that many other fish farms have been plagued by, because their ocean pens are going to be larger, and so the fish will not be packed as densely in the cages. The ocean is approximately 1,300 feet deep where the cages are going to be installed. What this is going to do is allow for strong water currents to sweep fish waste away along with uneaten food, preventing the ocean floor from being polluted.
This fish farm is expected to be capable of producing 6,000 tons of tuna every year once it is fully operational. These 6,000 tons of tuna are going to serve Hawaii, the mainland United States, Japan and numerous other parts of Asia as well. In the year 2007 alone, fishermen caught a total of 224,921 tons worth of wild big eye tuna in the Pacific Ocean.
There are critics to this plan however, and several have told the board that they are worried that diseased farm fish could escape, and that they could contaminate wild tuna stocks. Other critics have said that they are worried about where the fish feed is going to be obtained by the Hawaii Oceanic company. If the project imports the feed that it uses, for example, then it will not be sustainable. The venture also seems like it may suffer from the same issues with pollution and disease as large scale cattle farms.
Photo Credits: http://www.hioceanictech.com/
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