Saving Seafood: Can We Grow Fish in Giant Robotic Cages?

We recently covered a study in which every single fish tested from U.S. streams was tainted with mercury. But that may be the least of our worries: The demand for fish will increase by 40 percent in the next two decades. As the world population hits 9 billion by 2050, the continued depletion of biodiversity and poor environmental conditions of the ocean could end up wiping fish completely off our menus. Not surprisingly though, aquaculture is picking up, and now more than 50 percent of the fish that ends up in our bellies was raised in coastal fish farms. Fish raised in farms near the coastline are exposed to more pollution than wild fish, and therefore grow to be less nutritious. Ideally, we'd like our fish to roam around freely in the sea before we eat them. Enter MIT’s Offshore Aquaculture Engineering Center, which is building robotic cages so fish ...