In the cold waters of the Pacific, the anchoveta once shimmered in swarms so vast that sailors described them as turning the sea into a river of quicksilver. They were small, unassuming fish, yet the abundance of the ocean rested upon their delicate bones. Seabirds wheeled overhead in their millions, sea lions and whales dove into their depths, and predatory fish rose through the blue to feed on them. In those shoals lived the vitality of the sea itself. But in our age, the anchoveta, along with sardines and menhaden, have been transformed from living threads in an ancient web into bags of meal and casks of oil. Ninety percent of the forage fish caught by human hands are not eaten by us but ground down to feed salmon being raised in the cold fjords of Norway and shrimp and fish in the tropical ponds of Southeast Asia.
It is one of the great ironies of our time. To farm the sea, we strip the sea. We take from the ocean’s foundation to build its surface anew, and in the process we imperil both. In 2016, the anchoveta failed to arrive in the expected numbers, and entire fishing seasons in Peru were canceled. Again in 2023, the same collapse occurred, this time coinciding with a spike in ocean temperatures that drove the fish to depths where nets could not reach. The seabirds starved, their nests abandoned. Seal pups died in the thousands. Farmers watched as the price of feed climbed and their livelihoods faltered. What seemed infinite revealed itself as fragile.
Kevin Fitzsimmons, an aquaculture scientist at the University of Arizona, has described the predicament with characteristic bluntness: “Reliance on wild-caught marine-animal ingredients is a weak link in the aquaculture supply chain. It puts global seafood security at risk, while also affecting vital marine ecosystems.” As the former president of the World Aquaculture Society, Fitzsimmons knows that what appears efficient on paper is brittle in practice.
Ninety percent of forage fish caught by humans are ground down into fish food.
Today, Fitzimmons is chairman of the F3 Challenge, a competition for the aquaculture industry to produce marine-animal free food for farmed fish. “Amid growing supply chain uncertainties, this contest offers an opportunity to future-proof farm operations by developing strong, sustainable feed contingency plans,” Fitzsimmons said. It is the voice of a scientist speaking, but also of a pragmatist who knows that disruption, like the sudden cancellation of Peru’s anchoveta fishery, will come again.
The paradox of aquaculture is that it is at once a salvation and a threat. It now provides more than half the fish we eat, and it has spared some wild stocks from further collapse. Yet the act of raising carnivorous fish—salmon, trout, grouper, shrimp—has bound us more tightly to the fragile shoals of forage fish. This is what scientists call the forage fish bottleneck. And in this bottleneck, the future of seafood, of food security for billions, of entire ocean ecosystems, is squeezed.
The realization that fish do not need to eat fish to grow—that what they require are nutrients, not the bodies of other creatures—may seem obvious once said aloud. But it is an idea as revolutionary as the day when humans first understood that plants could be sown in neat rows and harvested, that food could be cultivated rather than chased. The birth of agriculture 10,000 years ago was not the discovery of seeds; it was the recognition that sustenance could be abstracted, reimagined, shaped to our will. So too now, the future of fish feed begins with a recognition: The proteins and oils that have always come from the sea can come, instead, from our imagination.
BARRACUDA: Aquaculture has become a barracuda industry of the ocean, catching and mashing forage fish into feed for farmed seafood. Photo by Virgil Zetterlind.
When Fitzsimmons and his colleagues launched the F3 Challenge in 2015, they did not turn to governments to regulate or to foundations to endow. They chose instead the ancient spur of human ingenuity: a prize. “By incentivizing farms to innovate,” Fitzsimmons explained, “we reduce pressure on wild fish stocks while building a more resilient and sustainable seafood system for the future.”
History remembers moments like this. The prize offered for determining longitude at sea in the 18th century, which spurred clockmakers to craft chronometers more precise than ever imagined. The Orteig Prize, which drove Charles Lindbergh across the Atlantic, opening the era of aviation. Similarly, the F3 Challenge is not a discovery imposed from above, but a challenge flung wide, trusting that competition and ambition will drive a breakthrough.
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