Food from the sea

One hundred and thirty five years ago, when the Marine Biological Association was founded at a meeting at the Royal Society in London, it was agreed to establish a laboratory at Plymouth with one of the key aims being to support the improvement in the effectiveness of fishing industry through the ‘investigation of the habits and organisation of the fisheries of our British waters’ (Anon 1887). Such endeavor in an international context is still of prime importance today. Our world population is projected to exceed 9 billion by 2050 and the gap in potential protein production for this world population increase has been emphasized (Godfray et al. Reference Godfray, Beddington, Crute, Haddad, Lawrence, Muir, Pretty, Robinson, Thomas and Toulmin2010). Over recent decades this has led to increasing exploitation of food from the sea with the global production of fish increasing eight-fold since 1950 (Béné et al. Reference Béné, Barange, Subasinghe, Pinstrup-Andersen, Merino, Hemre and Williams2015). Both fishing and aquaculture has contributed to this increased production. The effect of human diet on production of greenhouse gas emissions and consequent effects on climate change has been highlighted (Tilman and Clark Reference Tilman and Clark2014). Diets including fish rather than other animal proteins ameliorate such emissions and fish also has excellent nutritional qualities giving even further impetus to increasing fish production (Tilman and Clark Reference Tilman and Clark2014, Béné et al. Reference Béné, Barange, Subasinghe, Pinstrup-Andersen, Merino, Hemre and Williams2015).