Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hi, I haven't seen this discussed before.

I just now saw a documentary on fish farms, here is the trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ag0Y9xCatM8
Go to 1:56 to see the chart showing how much PCB and other toxic stuff the farmed Salmon contains. I thought that this was because of all the chemicals they were spraying on the fish to get rid of lice, but it was because of the fish feed a french researcher working at the university of Bergen in Norway said. The salmon had double the amount of fat than regular wild salmon and this toxic stuff accumulates in the fat, that is why this is so toxic. And apparently the researcher said that the fish got this from the pellets they were giving to the fish. He did some tests on mice and discovered that when feeding them only farmed salmon they got really overweight compared to the control group. So apparently stuff that was in the pellets that made the fish fat also made the mice fat after the mice had eaten the fat fish. The researcher apparently had stopped eating all farmed fish after seeing these results. If you want to see the documentary you have to go to the rt site and watch it live online when there is schedule for a documentary programming. I saw the program an hour ago or so, that is why I think it is running for a couple of days.

Aren't you guys sceptical to the fish pellets and what they contain? It seems like all farmed fish are off the table. But the problem with non-farmed fish is the high heavy-metal contamination. Does anyone here have any data on that?

looking Forward to some interesting answers.

Well, that link sent me on a bit of a youtube journey and it's depressing...
This vid didn't fill me with joy either -



I lived on the QLD's Sunshine Coast for many years and there were several massive fish kills in the Maroochy river which were never officially traced but it's likely that someone decided to dump unwanted agricultural wastes into creeks or drains that flowed into it. (I don't doubt that the source was found, but it certainly wasn't publicised).
The Noosa river was once considered fairly pristine but it too had chemical pollution issues that caused dramatic and disturbing mutations in fish stocks, or at least in fry populations.
Really sucks that this is an ongoing issue. I hate to imagine what is leaching from the immaculate lawns of canal estates and from golf courses into tributaries and rivers.
It's looking more and more like the nearly impossible and time wasting farming of our own fish feed is the only way we can come close to avoiding this problem. But I doubt it is feasible for many of us on the scale we require. Really wish we could use tilapia in AP over here, that would make it a lot easier to source (hopefully) clean feed rations. I fear that natural sources of fish protein are tainted to some degree.

Do the commercial suppliers of AQ feed rations routinely test for contaminants and publish the results or claim maximum levels? (Mercury, PCB's, PBDEs, etc?)

With the amount of pollution that is everywhere these days..... is there anything that isnt toxic?



[spoiler] Answer: No [/spoiler]