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Hey there,
Welcome to our quarterly newsletter! Here, you’ll find a more in-depth analysis about our various programs from the third quarter. We also include blurbs on new team members, recent conferences, a new job opening in Andhra Pradesh, India, and more.
The feature story of this newsletter is one of our programs that we don’t often give sufficient airspace to: our work in China. We have been running this project for several years now, and despite the majority of our efforts going into our work in India, we believe that we’ve been able to achieve some significant results. You can see more below.
That’s all for now—we hope you enjoy the deep dive!
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Thanks for all the ways you make the world a brighter place,
Haven King-Nobles
Executive Director
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By The Numbers
The following numbers pertain to our third quarter programming, unless otherwise noted:
- Fishes estimated to be helped: 128,000 (340,000 total in 2023)
- Farms added to our Alliance for Responsible Aquaculture (ARA): 36 (100 active farms right now)
- Other ARA metrics:
- Overall adherence to our corrective actions: 92%
- Number of individual farm visits to measure water quality: 482
- Percent of time ARA farms are in our required water quality range: 67%
- Ongoing in-field research projects: 2 (one was completed three weeks ago, see our August newsletter for more info)
- Fish farms in China visited: 12
- China-focused conferences supported or co-hosted: 2
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Highlight
FWI in China
Lu, our China specialist, attended the World Farm Animal Welfare-Beijing Consensus Meeting in Rome last month.
We follow the numbers. That’s been a part of FWI’s ethos from the very beginning: identifying the areas with the greatest potential for impact, and then launching projects there. This is in fact the main reason why we focused on farmed fishes in the first place!
For the same reason, FWI has also had an ongoing project in China for two years now. The challenges of work in China are certainly formidable—more on those below—but we believe the potential to support work in a country that farms just as many fishes as all other countries in the world combined makes these challenges worth it.
Aquaculture production globally and in Asia, based on 2022 FAO data. China alone accounts for 56.7% of world aquaculture production for aquatic animals.
What does FWI do in China?
As you may already know, FWI’s project in India is largely bottom-up: we work collaboratively with farmers to make win-win welfare improvements, in part in order to build a base that we might later leverage into policy. FWI’s project in China works from the other direction: we are working with academics, NGOs, and other partners to develop fish welfare standards and generally raise the profile of fish welfare as a field—especially as it connects with traditional Chinese values.
Specifically, the following are some of the activities FWI has engaged in so far:
- Helping set welfare standards: Earlier this year, in collaboration with our partners at International Cooperation Committee of Animal Welfare (ICCAW), we began research to set welfare standards for two of the most high-priority species in China: grass carp (Ctenopharyngodon idella), and large yellow croaker (Larimichthys crocea). The idea here is that the standards we’re collaboratively developing can later influence industry in a positive direction. Learn more.
- Conference in China: Together with ICCAW and Shanghai Ocean University, we co-hosted the first Aquatic Animal Welfare Forum at the World Conference on Farm Animal Welfare in 2022, introducing the idea of aquatic animal welfare to participants from aquaculture industry, nonprofits, academia, and government. Learn more.
- FAO Conference: In September 2023, we co-hosted the World Farm Animal Welfare-Beijing Consensus Meeting at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
- Farm visits: We visited 12 fish farms in Q3 of this year across multiple provinces in China in order to gain a deeper understanding of current farming systems. We were accompanied by both Chinese and international fish experts.
What are some of the key insights we’ve had so far?
The following are a few:
- Advancing fish welfare in China, more so than nearly every other place, is a long-term process.
- As with many species and contexts of fish farming, more context-specific research is desperately needed on fish welfare. However, this doesn’t mean there’s no research at all currently available—many times, whether for translation issues or simply the platforms where studies are published, papers on fish welfare in China are not easily accessible to external researchers.
- It's essential that our strategies resonate with Chinese culture and realities. By aligning fish welfare interventions with traditional values, existing eco-friendly farming knowledge, and sustainability goals, we will be better equipped to have the impact we intend.
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Updates: Alliance for Responsible Aquaculture
Q3 presented an opportunity for the ARA to further expand our team, add new farms, and critically assess our programming. The foundation of all this work is our ground team working relentlessly to onboard farmers to the ARA. And as the ARA grows, so does our team. To attract more talent, we revised and standardized our hiring process and thus found our new Program Coordinator, Sai, and Data Collector, Sanjay.
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Sai, our new Program Coordinator, onboards Pandu Ranga Rao, a farmer raising Catla and Rohu fishes in his 17-acre farm in Jalipudi, Andhra Pradesh, into the Alliance for Responsible Aquaculture.
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Backed by the new team members, we scoped farming villages and added a further 36 farms in Q3. The farms committed to a stocking density limit and improving their water quality. It is through these improvements that we helped 128,000 fish in Q3.
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Welfare Standard Department Updates
Over the past quarter, we’ve largely focused on continuing and completing our ongoing observational studies on focus farms (see Study #2 in this previous newsletter)—farms with a disproportionate number of welfare issues. Our hope here is that the observations will shed light on why some farms apparently lead to much worse welfare than others. Full results from both of these tests are still pending, though our preliminary findings are showing us interesting insights.
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FWI staff Nikhil, Teja, and Jen (left to right) collect water parameter data from a focus farm in Andhra Pradesh—a focus farm is one that has been identified to have persistent and/or severe welfare issues.
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The main work of our Welfare Standard Department in Q3 however has been more internally-focused: we onboarded a new lead for the department, Paul, and have reworked up our upcoming roster of fish welfare tests to make them both more useful and more rigorous.
The changes here have actually been significant enough to cause us to rechristen this department the “Research & Development Department”—a nod to the expanded mandate we have given Paul and his team to not just identify welfare improvements that fit our current programming, but to investigate potentially more impactful programs altogether.
The shift from just “welfare standards” to broader “research & development” represents a change in the focus and scope of FWI, one that we hope will, of course, lead to greater impact for fishes. We plan to talk more about the reasoning behind these decisions in upcoming blog posts.
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New Team Members: Durga Prasad and Narala Sanjay Kumar
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We're delighted to welcome Durga, an aquaculture graduate with a love for Andhra Pradesh's traditional Kolattam dance, and Sanjay, also with a strong academic background in aquaculture and a passion for fish welfare and nature. Both Durga Prasad and Sanjay join us as Data Collectors, a role vital to our on-ground efforts and welfare interventions. Together, they aim to bolster our efforts with their expertise and passion.
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What Do We Learn From Animal Advocacy Conferences?
Over 2023, our team has participated in about ten conferences—most recently, animal advocacy conferences in Malaysia and an effective altruism conference in the Philippines. We’ve spent weeks and probably over $10,000 on these conferences at this point. Are these conferences worth the investment?
It’s often hard to know on the margin, but overall, for our organization we believe the answer is a resounding yes. Conferences help us achieve the following values:
- Identifying new staff: for instance, we first met our now-colleague Siddharth at EAGx India.
- Identifying new donors.
- Brainstorming strategy about how to advance fish welfare with others in our movement.
- Inspiring our team by feeling part of something much bigger than ourselves. We think this is especially important given that the majority of our team has never been involved in animal protection before, and we see conferences as a way of helping them feel that they, whether or not they’re with FWI, belong in this movement.
We’re immensely grateful to all the organizers of all these conferences for helping us and other organizations actualize these values. 🙂
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Karthik, our Managing Director, and Haven, our Executive Director, taking part in the Asia Animal Advocacy Strategy Workshop with other animal advocates in Malaysia.
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Other News in Fish Welfare
- Aquatic Life Institute (ALI) launched an upgraded aquaculture certification benchmark tool and published a report on aquatic animal welfare in the context of multiple Sustainable Development Goals.
- A new literature review highlighted the sea bass and sea bream farming industry in priority countries.
- The rare Leopard Toby Puffer Fish, renowned for distinctive stripes and spots, made an unexpected appearance in Australia's Coral Sea Marine Park.
- Yale researchers updated the fish Tree of Life, uncovering surprising genetic links between seemingly unrelated fish species.
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Know of other upcoming events or interesting news? Feel free to send them over, and we’ll include them next time!
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A small bluestreak cleaner wrasse (Labroides dimidiatus) tends to a larger Map Pufferfish (Arothron mappa) client. Credit: David Clode/Unsplash
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A species group known as cleaner fishes exhibit self-control, a trait typically associated with more complex animals. In an experiment, these fishes could resist the temptation of a nearby meal in favor of a bigger meal promised later. This type of delay in gratification is an indicator of cognitive sophistication—in fact, this trait is tested for in human children through the marshmallow test! |
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