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Hey there,
Happy belated new year! We hope the start of 2024 is going well for you.
Instead of looking back on the last quarter as we normally do, we’re taking the chance to reflect more on the last full year—and all the important outcomes, as well as challenges, that came with it. You can see a summary of that in our highlight below, or check out our recent 2023 in Review post for the full report.
As part of our efforts to communicate our programming more consistently and transparently, we’ve also published various other new blog posts:
Lastly, we still have a relatively larger funding gap than we normally do at this time of the year, so donations now are particularly useful. To learn more about the value and the considerations of a donation to FWI, see our Donation Page FAQ.
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Have a great weekend!
Haven King-Nobles
Executive Director
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By The Numbers
The following are the numbers that we think are most significant for our work. Note that, unlike our usual quarterly By the Numbers section, these pertain to the entire year of 2023.
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FWI Data Collector Durga Prasad using the Winkler Titration Method to measure dissolved oxygen from water samples. We increasingly use this over handheld meters as a more accurate method of assessing oxygen levels.
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Highlight
Our 2023 in Review
We recently published our annual year-in-review post, in which we discuss the successes, challenges, and changes we’ve made throughout the year. For those interested, we recommend reading the full post. But if a shorter newsletter summary is more your style, we’re including such a summary here.
Overall, we feel 2023 is best characterized as a year of unintentional setup: We began the year with ambitious plans to scale, but, because of limitations with both our interventions and our research, these plans turned out to be premature.
Instead, the key accomplishments of the year to us are more about the capacity and foundations we’ve built: We revamped our research department (rechristening it to the “R&D Department”) and believe it is now more capable of developing evidence-based interventions. We also made improvements to our farmer program, and are also focusing heavily now on innovation within it.
There were also important impacts we achieved in the year itself—namely, we estimate that our program improved the lives of 450,000 fishes. However, overall we generally fell short of our goals for the year.
2024 will be a critical year for our work. With it, we’re betting that our increased investments in R&D will lead to more scalable interventions, and that these interventions will translate into improvements in the lives of the millions of farmed fishes who live in these understudied farming systems.
Thank you to all those who helped us reach this point.
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Farmer Program Updates
The following updates pertain to our farmer program, the Alliance for Responsible Aquaculture (ARA), from last quarter:
- Farms onboarded: The ARA is continuing to run strongly in India, and recently onboarded its 100th active* farm.
- New hire: We began hiring for a new Program Coordinator.
- New program models: We are currently considering improved program models, particularly regarding adjusting our measurement frequency to be more dynamic based on past instances of issues. More on that shortly!
- Backend tech update: We’ve continued building our new data management software, thanks to the support of our volunteer Ruben van Erk from Vegan Hacktivists. We expect this tool to free up our ground team’s time from focusing quite as much on data management, and we plan to roll it out this quarter.
- Farmer adherence: Farmer adherence to our corrective actions in Q4 stood at 92%, which was roughly our target goal.
- Stocking density monitoring improvement: We recently published this post about a flaw in FWI’s density monitoring system, and how we are addressing it.
*Active farmers are those that currently have fishes present in their farm. This stands in contrast to farmers who have harvested their fishes more than three months back and not yet restocked. We have recently had more farmers maintain their farms empty for longer periods due to local elections, which prolonged the local auction process for leasing farms.
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Research & Development Updates
The following updates pertain to our R&D Department from last quarter:
- 2024 Planning: Over the past quarter, our R&D team has largely focused on narrowing down and planning our studies for 2024. Learn more in our recent post.
- Dissolved Oxygen Study Results: We have now published the findings from the observational study we ran in the fall, in which we looked in-depth at a few specific farms to better understand their issues. One specific finding we found interesting was a stronger relationship than we expected between biomass and dissolved oxygen, suggesting the importance of not overcrowding.
- This quarter, the R&D team is focusing on finalizing the protocols for at least two of the studies we plan to run, as per our OKRs.
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FWI Corporate Outreach Manager Subrata speaking about the importance of fish welfare at a farmer training event in Odisha, India.
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Policy Updates
The following updates pertain to our Policy and Stakeholder Department from last quarter:
- Seminar event: We participated in a 2-day national seminar on sustainable aquaculture, at St. Joseph’s College in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh.
- Farmer training: We conducted a 3-day field visit and training in Odisha, in collaboration with our local partner DVARA and their partner farmers (see photo above).
- Potential partnership: We met the aquaculture service company IIFSA to initiate discussions for a prospective partnership. This would likely involve us contracting IFFSA to implement our standards with a larger number of farmers.
- Policy research: We worked on compiling a repository of India’s federal fisheries laws, which we hope will later be useful for other fish advocates, as well as for our own work.
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Resource: How Conscious Can a Fish Be?
Despite its importance, fish welfare isn’t exactly of mainstream interest to the majority of the population. That’s why we were all the more impressed to see animal advocate Ryuji Chua featured on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, where Ryuji’s message of ethical, rational concern for these animals was broadcasted to millions of viewers.
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Animal activist and fish advocate Ryuji Chua, featured on The Daily Show.
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While Ryuji’s appearance is certainly entertaining, the more useful resource is probably the 41 minute video he made that landed him on the show in the first place: How Conscious Can A Fish Be?. It’s clear, well-researched, and very compelling—definitely a must-watch for any fish advocate.
A note on newsletter content: We’re considering making this a recurring section of some of our newsletters. As always, feel free to let us know if you have opinions on how useful/interesting such a section is. |
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Job Openings
- We’re hiring Indian nationals to join us in Andhra Pradesh as a Field Manager. This role will oversee on-site operations, establish and nurture connections with farmers, conduct field studies, and more. Deadline: rolling.
- Charity Entrepreneurship is hiring for a Director of Outreach to work remotely. Deadline: rolling.
For many other open positions at pro-animal organizations, check out Animal Advocacy Careers' Job Board.
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Other News in Fish Welfare
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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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Checkered puffers (S. testudineus) live in marine and brackish waters and make low-pitch croaking or scraping sounds. Credit: Sylvain Le Bris/iNaturalist
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Many fish species produce sounds, often referred to as "songs". These sounds help fishes communicate, mate, and establish territories underwater. The sounds go unheard by land-dwellers because water, being 800 times denser than air, acts as a sound barrier, reflecting underwater sounds back.
And humans have known about fish sounds for at least 150 years! Naturalist Charles Abbott wrote in 1884 about “deep grunts,” “love calls,” and “the faint squeak of a mouse” when discussing different species.
Over 700 species have been documented as sound producing. Today, there are databases of actual fish sounds and detailed inventories of all species known to “sing”. |
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