The developed world's demand for shrimp has spurred a global boom in shrimp aquaculture , with harmful effects on ocean wildlife. Valuable coastal habitats , like mangrove forests, are bulldozed and replaced with shrimp ponds. This wipes out nursery waters for juvenile fish and pollutes coastal waters with shrimp-farm runoff . Salmon farming is a messy business Most farmed salmon are raised in ocean pens, like cattle in a feed lot. So many fish concentrated in one area produce tons of manure, which pollutes the water.
Diseases can spread from salmon in the crowded pens to wild salmon.
Antibiotics and other drugs used to control those diseases leak out into the environment, creating drug-resistant disease organisms. We comb the seas for small fish to make into feed for shrimp and salmon. It takes two to four pounds of wild fish to produce one pound of farmed fish. We turn four pounds of wild fish into one pound of farmed fish Farming meat-eating fish is an inefficient way to produce food. Salmon are predators , near the top of the food chain .