Just as agriculture is the science and art of raising terrestrial organisms, aquaculture is the science and art of cultivating aquatic organisms. Traditionally man viewed the waters of the world as the source of an inexhaustible supply of food. Occasionally a particular aquatic species was depleted by overfishing, but there were always other species and other waters just over the horizon. An increasing world population forced the development of large, highly mobile fishing fleets to seek out and harvest this vast food supply. From an annual harvest of 20 million tons in 1950, the world catch nearly quad-rupled by 1970, but is expected to reach its maximum sustainable yield of around 100 million tons by the 1980s. To surpass this limit, man must learn to farm the water as effectively as he farms the land.
Although the concept of aquaculture probably arose from the practice of harvesting fish trapped in flood basins, its exact origins are not clear. The earliest book on aquaculture, a...
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Bardach, J. E.; Ryther, J. H.; and McLarney, W. O., 1972. Aquaculture: The Farming and Husbandry of Freshwater and Marine Organisms. New York: Wiley-Interscience, 868p.
Pillay, T. V. R., and Dill, W. A., eds., 1979. Advances in Aquaculture. Farnham: Fishing News Books Ltd., 651p.
Stickney, R. R., 1979. Principles of Warmwater Aquaculture. New York: Wiley and Sons, 375p.
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© 1982 Hutchinson Ross Publishing Company
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Conklin, D.E., Hartman, M.C. (1982). Aquaculture . In: Beaches and Coastal Geology. Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-30843-1_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-30843-1_18
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