TITLE:
Is Fish Domestication Going Too Fast?
AUTHORS:
Fabrice Teletchea
KEYWORDS:
Domestication, Farmed Animals, Mammals, Fish, Global Change
JOURNAL NAME:
Natural Resources,
Vol.7 No.6,
June
28,
2016
ABSTRACT: Domestication is a very strong process that has enabled humans to produce both plants and animals with desired traits. For land animals, this process started about 12,000 years ago and resulted in that today hundreds of well-defined breeds are available for the five most important farmed mammal species (cattle, pig, horse, sheep and goat). For aquatic animals, this process started much earlier, and the bulk of domestication of new species dated back only to the early 1980s. Nevertheless, there are now numerous fish species for which the life cycle is already closed in captivity and some domesticated fish have been genetically improved. This implies that what probably took hundreds of years in mammals (i.e., to control the life cycle in captivity and then to improve captive individuals) has been accomplished in only tens of years for some fish species. Based on the main problems observed today in farmed mammals, the possible consequences of this fast domestication of fish are discussed.