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To quantify aquaculture’s reliance on wild-caught fish, researchers rely on the “Fish In: Fish Out” (FIFO) metric: how much fish goes into the food to produce a certain amount of farmed fish. There are a variety of ways to calculate this metric and recent research suggests that results can differ broadly depending on how the “fish in” side of the equation is defined.

Unlike animals like pigs and chicken, carnivorous fish eat mostly other fish, not things like corn or grass. And it takes approximately 6 tons of wild fish (“wet fish”) to produce 1 ton of (dehydrated) fish meal, further skewing the numbers. Thus, the 1.1 kg of feed required by the Atlantic salmon (and sea bream/bass?) to gain 1 kg represents a considerably higher number of actual wild fish.

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