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Hey there,
Welcome to our quarterly newsletter, where we include more comprehensive updates about all of our program areas. Since this edition is even longer than usual, we especially recommend skipping to the sections that are most interesting to you.
A few pieces of news to highlight at the top:
Lastly, recent investigations into the Indian shrimp industry have been making waves with both industry and policymakers. Though the story here isn’t about animal welfare, we wanted to mention it because it illustrates several important themes for aquatic animal advocates: The importance of intersectional investigations, the limitations of certification schemes, and the ability of Western consumers and policymakers to influence practices in exporting countries.
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Have a great week/weekend,
Haven King-Nobles
Executive Director
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By the Numbers
The following pertain to FWI’s first quarter of work (in India):
- Fishes estimated helped: 146,000 (total: 1.8M)
- Farms onboarded: 15 (total active: 118)
- Monitoring visits conducted on farms: 615
- Percentage of visits where we found water quality to be out of our required range: 11%
- Ongoing R&D studies: 1
- Advisories sent to government agencies: 2
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Highlight: Our farm program in action
Our current main avenue for helping fishes is our farm program in India, the Alliance for Responsible Aquaculture. In this newsletter’s feature article, we wanted to share an example of how this program operates:
One farmer we work with—we'll call him "R"—has been in our program for nine months. He farms about 50,000 rohu and catla. Our team conducts regular visits to monitor and advise R on practices to increase fish welfare.
During a February visit, our data collector Sanjay observed fish gasping for air on the water’s surface. Our measurements, which indicated both very low dissolved oxygen and high ammonia, further confirmed a problem. This combination of both negative behavioral and environmental welfare indicators suggests these fishes were in some significant state of suffering.
After returning to the farm for an evening follow-up visit, we asked R to implement corrective actions to improve water quality—specifically, to temporarily add zeolite and to cease supplemental feeding. These actions were designed to reduce the nutrient load on the farm and to allow oxygen and ammonia levels to stabilize.
We returned to the farm three days later, and found that R had only partially implemented the corrective actions, and that water quality was still extremely poor. We requested R again to implement the corrective actions in their entirety.
Fortunately, this time he did, and during our next follow-up visit three more days later, the water quality had returned to the required range and the fishes had stopped gasping. Based on this information, the instance underwent an internal review and was later added to our impact estimates spreadsheet.
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A different fish farmer, Murthy Raju, with his enrollment paper for the ARA farm program, with FWI data collector Sanjay.
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We believe this case with R illustrates a few important aspects about our work:
First, compliance with animal welfare (or any) mandates should not be taken for granted. This is partly why we work directly on the ground with farmers.
And second, it illustrates how our farm program does have various limitations: It involves resource intensive field visits which are reactive in nature; it requires balancing the interests of the fish with the interests of the farmer; and it operates on the relatively limited evidence base of Indian major carp welfare. These limitations are in large part why we’re exploring alternative interventions to help these animals, via our R&D work. See below!
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Program Update: Research & Development
In 2023, we broadened the mandate of our research to explore other theories of change, in the hope that they could be more impactful than what we are currently executing. That led us to the creation of our R&D Department, for which Q1 was its first full quarter of operation.
During this quarter, we mainly focused on a) implementing our satellite study, and b) developing plans and protocols for the other studies we are conducting this year. A number of studies were considered, from which we decided to proceed with the following:
- Water quality monitoring via satellites: Validating the use of satellite imagery for remote water quality monitoring (ongoing).
- Modified feed: Assessing whether supplemented feed is both a) welfare-improving, and b) economically viable (in planning).
- Welfare assessment protocol development: Developing a welfare assessment protocol to better quantify and assess the welfare of farmed Indian major carp (in planning).
- Dissolved oxygen tolerance assessment: Assessing the levels of DO and ammonia that Indian major carp can tolerate without welfare concerns (in planning).
While we may execute additional studies this year, these are the four we are conducting for now. You can learn more about them in our recent post:
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Program Update: Alliance For Responsible Aquaculture
We started the Alliance for Responsible Aquaculture (ARA), our farm program, almost three years ago. The past three years have seen us go through cycles of troubleshooting, programmatic improvements, and expansion. In Q1 of 2024, we experienced all three of those!
Troubleshooting: We realized that many farms are smaller than their paperwork suggests, which means that they were actually stocking above the recommended level. To resolve this, we recalculated farm sizes for over 100 farms using satellite imagery and informed the farmers about the implications for their stocking densities. Learn more.
Programmatic improvements: We rolled out a system to adjust farm visit frequencies based on how frequently water quality has historically been out of range. We’ll run our first evaluation on this revised system shortly—stay tuned for updates!
Expansion: We onboarded 15 new farms, and began scoping a new region in which we expect to add farms in Q3.
Helping fish: We estimate that we improved the lives of 146,000 fishes via this program in Q1, including the instance discussed in the feature article above.
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Program Update: Policy & Stakeholder Advocacy
The following were our main activities conducted in the first quarter for the purpose of engaging stakeholders and advocating for fish-friendly policies in India:
- Advisories submitted: We sent advisories to two separate state governments about the importance of considering the One Health paradigm as it applies to fisheries and aquaculture.
- Comments on policies: We submitted comments on the Aquatic Animal and Health Management Bill 2019 (the bill, despite being produced in 2019, is still in the draft stage).
- Legal repository: We created a repository on state laws for the major fish-producing states in India.
- Article published: We supported the publication of an article advocating for increasing policy adoption of fish welfare.
- Partnership planning: We initiated planning with the livelihoods-supporting corporation DVARA for a project we plan to undertake with them over the rest of the year. More details on this shortly!
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Website Improvements
In order to increase transparency and usefulness, we recently added the following pages to our website:
- A “Projects Page”, which discusses our ongoing projects (see below).
- An “Other Resources Page”, which links to other organizations, websites, funds, job boards, and newsletters that may be of interest for aquatic animal advocates.
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Veeresh joins our team as our latest Operations Assistant to our Managing Director of India. He holds a postgraduate degree in Development Studies Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, and is passionate about animal welfare and conservation. Welcome Veeresh!
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Other News in Fish Welfare
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What We’re Reading: The New Fish
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FWI primarily works to understand and improve the lives of various species of carp, as these are the animals farmed most heavily in India and China. However, we of course care about the welfare of all fishes.
That’s why we were interested to read The New Fish, a revealing exploration of the salmon farming industry. Reading this book reminds one of the broiler chicken industry: A few industry pioneers develop a dramatically more efficient way to farm animals, in the process creating something akin to a new species, and get fabulously wealthy in the process. Meanwhile, negative externalities, such as pollution, human health, animal welfare, go overlooked and sometimes deliberately concealed. Especially for salmon consumers, this book is worth a read.
I (Haven) once visited a salmon farm in Norway, in which 8 pens floated in this scenic fjord and held about 200,000 salmon each. Comparing this to the roughly 500,000 wild salmon remaining in Norway, it was startling to realize that this single farm held several times the country's entire wild salmon population—a stark illustration of the industry's scale.
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The Splitfin flashlightfish (Anomalops katoptron) uses specialized light-emitting organs beneath its eyes to communicate and navigate in the depths of the central and western Pacific Ocean. Credit: 2018 Dante Fenolio
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The Splitfin flashlightfish (Anomalops katoptron) is a species inhabiting the tropical waters of the central and western Pacific Ocean, distinguished by its bioluminescent properties. This fish possesses specialized light-emitting organs beneath its eyes, emitting a greenish-blue glow for communication, navigation, and potentially prey attraction.
During daylight, these fish seek shelter in caves or under ledges, emerging at night to feed, utilizing their bioluminescent light for nocturnal activities such as locating prey or communicating with others in the dark depths of the sea. Interestingly, these fish can "blink" their bioluminescent light on and off, which may be used for signaling or camouflage.
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If you were forwarded this email, you can sign up for the FWI mailing list here.
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Lastly, a big shoutout and word of thanks once again to our volunteer Alyssa Bianca Chua of the Philippines for doing all of the formatting and some of the content for this month's newsletter!
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