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The class visits a fish farm. Dinakaran Michael and Samantha Kerby are fourth and fifth from the left.
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Fish Farming, Increasing Worldwide, Has Impact at Oberlin
DECEMBER 2, 1999--Little did Samantha Kerby know when she signed up for Biology 210 that the course would alter her career plans. In the class--Aquaculture--she is learning about the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. agricultural economy, with a value of nearly $1 billion.
Kerby, a junior from San Anselmo, California, had already set her sights on going into organic farming. Now she knows that with the dwindling supply of wild-caught fish--due to over-harvesting, habitat degradation, and pollution--aquaculture (fish farming) has the potential to fill many gaps in the seafood deficit--and to broaden her own goals for the future.
Growing aquatic organisms in confined waters and harvesting the production for human consumption and use began in Egypt and China over 2000 years ago, says Kerby's professor, R. Dinakaran Michael. In this century, Michael says, fish farming more than tripled worldwide from 1984 to 1996, when it was valued at $42 billion. A visiting professor of biology and Shansi Faculty Fellow at Oberlin this semester, Michael heads the postgraduate and research department of zoology at American College in Madurai, India. He is one of the world's leading experts on fish immunology.
Kerby, an environmental-studies major, was delighted to learn that the aquaculture course would be added to the biology curriculum this semester. She found it especially serendipitous to learn--long after signing up for the course--that her summer job on a horse ranch in Northern California would include helping to build a pond for bass farming.
More than three months into the course--and into an ExCo class in sustainable agriculture--she says that aquaculture is figuring in her plans to go into organic farming after graduation. Her hands-on experience with the Oberlin Sustainable Agriculture Project (OSAP) has also helped confirm her career choice. An enthusiast of all things growing since childhood, she chose Oberlin, rather than an agricultural school, for its environmental-studies program.
"Mike," as Michael likes to be called, has furthered the students' knowledge of aquaculture with field trips to four fish farms in Northern Ohio, including Freshwater Farms of Ohio in Urbana. Though it focuses primarily on hatching fish eggs and growing fingerlings for sale as stock, the farm also grows fish for sale by mail order and over the Internet.
Among the 180,000 fish that Freshwater Farms grows are rainbow trout, largemouth bass, yellow perch, standard and hybrid bluegill, channel catfish, crawfish, Japanese Koi, goldfish, a variety of minnows, and sturgeon.
Kerby says the students' visit to Freshwater Farms graphically demonstrated aquaculture's symbiotic relationship with farming. There the students saw fish waste, which can ruin the surrounding habitat if not correctly disposed of, vacuumed from the fish tanks and made available to neighboring farms as fertilizer.
The trips also demonstrated the scope of aquaculture in Ohio. As of this January, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources Division of Wildlife had granted--through the Aquaculture Program of the Ohio State University Piketon Research and Extension Centers--71 propagator and aquaculture permits to grow fish for food and ponds.
"The aquaculture course is an example of the kind of Oberlin learning experience that highlights the practical side of biology," says biology-department chair Catherine McCormick. "Students really appreciate this kind of course, and the biology faculty were delighted to accept Dr. Michael's offer to teach it. Today aquaculture is the major source of healthy food for the increasing world population, and it will become even more so in the coming millennium."
Please send comments, questions, and suggestions about Oberlin Online news and feature articles to Linda.Grashoff@oberlin.edu.
