The environmental impact of aquaculture operations

Type :

Term papers

Pages :

5 pages

Format :

.doc

Published date :

07/29/2009

Category :

Political science

Sub category :

Ecology & environment

Oboulo.com selection criteria

$ 10.95 Add to cart

Summary :

Introduction
Environmental detriments considered
Sustainable aquaculture
1. Aquacultural practices
2. Form of recycling
Perspective: Aquaculture in China
1. The result of Porphyra yezoensis aquaculture
2. The green-tide off the Chinese coast
Conclusions
References

Abstract

Human cultivation has produced habitats specialized for artificially spawning and nurturing aquatic animals and plants in fresh and marine waters. By assisting to meet the market demand for seafood consumption, aqua cultural operations have yielded clear and significant financial advantages, offering employment opportunities, and, in certain instances, replenishing the depleted natural stock. However, they also present an environmental danger to local bio-diversity, and a significant risk to the health of wild or natural animal species. "Farming" discourages the continued fishing and exploitation of marine life to the point of diminished or endangered population levels, but it also introduces diseases and mutations into that same population while damaging the natural environment through pollutant runoff. aquaculture is therefore at once a positive and a negative solution to unmet commercial demand for seafood.

The paper will review recent scientific literature to address the concern with ancillary environmental pollutants resulting from open water and land-based aquacultural efforts (also known as "fish farming"), and the health threat to natural (wild) marine animal populations from artificially cultivated (farmed) stocks. In examining this topic, it is the intention of this essay to explore the broader issue of human or anthropocene impact on re-shaping the natural environment, and its consequential effect upon bio-diversity and natural ecology. While humans have long inhabited coastal zones and undertaken both land and water cultivation practices, the technological advancement in tools, fishing, and farming practices has caused an anthropocene effect which poses a dramatic effect on the environmental system. As a means of exploring this hypothesis, the essay will consider the emergence of aquacultural cultivation in developing Southeast Asian countries and their subsequent effect on the natural ecology.