Fish behavior: Dinner music at the fish farm

Scientists at Woods Hole are trying to train 5,000 hatchery-raised black sea bass to respond to a dinner bell for their meals, and one glance at sky-high supermarket fish-counter prices will explain why the researchers are willing to be the butt of jokes.

The hope is that the fish, like Pavlov's dogs, will become so attuned to 20 seconds of programmed sounds that, even after they are released into the wild and eat many meals on their own, the signal will eventually draw them back into a fisherman's net.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is spending $270,000 on this Buzzards Bay experiment, one of several it is undertaking to improve aquaculture. The goal of this one is to devise a way for fish farmers to avoid having to supply much of the feed for the bass as they mature into candidates for the dinner table.

Sadly, much more experimentation on fish farming will be needed in the future, because even as humanity's appetite for protein grows, the world's natural fish supplies are in peril due to overfishing and other pressures.

According to Scott Lindell, the director of the Marine Biological Laboratory's Scientific Aquaculture Program, an aquaculture operator will come out ahead if even just 50 percent of sound-trained hatchery fish return for their last supper. Another advantage of turning fish farmers into "cowboys of the ocean," in Lindell's term, is that the fish aren't raised in their own waste.

Currently, sustainable harvests of fish can meet just 70 percent of the world's demand. Aquaculture is supplying almost 40 percent of the seafood market, but the high cost of supplying feed to fish for their entire lives means high prices in retail stores.

An advocacy group, Food and Water Watch, has challenged the approval granted to the experiment by the US Army Corps of Engineers. A lawyer for the group last week asked a federal judge to block the study until an "adequate environmental process" has been done. In court papers, US Attorney Michael Sullivan argued against the injunction, saying that the approval was reasonable "given the modest scope of the proposed experiment."

The group raises valid questions about possible disruption of the natural ecosystem and the effect of sound-conditioning on wild fish. But Sullivan is right. The test-level scale of the marine laboratory's experiment should provide insights into any threats that Food and Water Watch is concerned about, without doing damage to Buzzards Bay. If the experiment points the way to a more natural and less costly way of farming fish without harming the bay's ecosystem, it will be worth many multiples of that $270,000.

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Fish behavior: Dinner music at the fish farm