in 1883 the eminent biologist T. H. Huxley said "In relation to our present modes of fishing, a number of the most important sea fisheries, such as the cod fishery are inexhaustible." He couldn't have been more wrong. The facts are that the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization reports Twenty-eight percent of fish stocks worldwide are overfished or even nearing extinction, and another 47 percent are near the limits of sustainability. the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that a third of fish stocks in US waters are in danger of depletion. To make matters worse, fish consumption has doubled between 2973 and 2997.

The answer to this delimma is open ocean aquaculture--raising fish in farms whose environment is the ocean itself. The United States is strongly the development of Ocean aqua farms. Open ocean fish farming has been done in the US for salmon, and in Europe and the Mediterranean, sometimes with mixed results that included many escaped fish. Because of the problems in the past, extensive testing has been done in order to evaluate the environmental impact of open ocean artificial fish culture and even whether the fish caging devices were strong enough to withstand the rough offshore waters. Once in place the effects of currents and storms on the cages were masured. Load cells were deployed with the mooring to measure tension in the mooring lines, and low power recording systems were deployed on the load cell mounting bars by divers.

The test location in Hawaii, about 2 miles off Ewa Beach on Oahu, showed no measurable impact to water quality or the ocean floor once one was a few hundred feet from the cage. It was determined that the low impact was due to feeding method, which was twice a day so that very little food reached the ocean floor, and to being located in offshore waters where there is an adequate current to carry waste products away from the site.

The US is not the only nation which is initiating aquaculture as a solution to the growing divergence between the need for fish and the wild fish population. Aquaculture operations are located coast to coast in the US, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Japan, the Philippines, India, Tailand, Vietnam, and most of South America, Egypt, India, China, and Europe.