The world’s oceans are largely free from intensive farming, but momentum to intensify and expand mariculture—the cultivation of aquatic organisms in the ocean—is growing. Despite optimism that mariculture will create economic and nutritional benefits for humans, it can also generate a host of risks, including environmental degradation, harms to wildlife integrity and welfare, captivity effects, and shifts in how humans view the nonhuman world. Collectively, we refer to these four types of risks as 'dewilding.' In this systematic review, we searched Scopus and Web of Science for recent literature documenting mariculture’s dewilding impacts to organize and collate this evidence under one unified framework. We find that mariculture’s dewilding impacts are consistently documented, though often in isolation, and that captivity and conceptual dewilding impacts are recognized as potential harms far less than impacts on the environment and wildlife. Future work examining mariculture’s dewilding impacts will be paramount to guiding human decision-making and activity going forward.
By Becca Franks, Chiawen Chiang
Artifishal is a film about people, rivers, and the fight for the future of wild fish and the environment that supports them. It explores wild salmon’s slide toward extinction, threats posed by fish hatcheries and fish farms, and our continued loss of faith in nature.
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