Is Good Fish Culture Management Harming Recovery Efforts in Aquaculture-Assisted Fisheries?

To make conservation aquaculture successful, a paradigm shift is needed in what is considered good hatchery management as defined by production aquaculture as well as in the metrics that are used to evaluate hatchery success. In production aquaculture, managers strive to maintain exceptional environmental conditions to maximize yield, the number of fish produced, and survival. However, this type of aquaculture management could decrease the likelihood of success of imperiled species recovery programs due to domestication and epigenetics. Consequently, good management practices in conservation aquaculture should produce conditions that resemble the environment where the fish will be stocked in order to minimize domestication and epigenetic problems that will lower the fitness of wild stocks following augmentation. Changes in what are considered good culture conditions require a new set of hatchery evaluation metrics. The key metric that needs to be altered is the survival rate. Survival is the keystone metric because it determines other metrics such as the number produced, yield, and profits. High survival rates influence domestication, which adversely affects post-augmentation survival and the fitness of the wild stock. Consequently, lower hatchery survival rates produced by selective pressures in conservation aquaculture are needed to improve success in imperiled species recovery programs. We propose that survival be 10-25% to improve success. Our proposed evaluation metrics for conservation aquaculture are to produce "wild" fish and not lower the fitness of the wild population. We recognize that these recommendations are controversial, but a major goal of this paper is to start a discussion about the most appropriate way to evaluate this type of aquaculture so that recovery efforts for imperiled species can be improved.