Cultivating a sea change

By taking up carbon they can also help to alleviate ocean acidification at a local scale. [...]seaweeds are incredibly nutritious," says Alecia Bellgrove, head of the DeakinSeaweed Research Group at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. Aquatic animals that require feed - mainly prawns and bony fish - also have an environmental advantage over animals raised in terrestrial agriculture. Because most are coldblooded, they convert food into body mass more efficiently than birds and mammals, which need energy to help regulate their body temperature. Diseases include parasites called sea lice in salmon; white spot syndrome virus in prawns, which emerged in the early 1990s and devastated prawn farming throughout Asia before spreading to the Americas; and tilapia lake virus, which threatens the economic and nutritional gains that freshwater aquaculture has made possible in many lowand middle-income countries. [...]many of these solutions are expensive and, therefore, out of reach for the small and medium-sized producers who make up the majority of the global aquaculture industry, producing food for subsistence or local markets in low- and middle-income countries. [...]diseases that threaten aquaculture are emerging every three to five years on average.