In the existing Neolithic civilizations, they passed from fruit, seed and root harvest to agriculture and from hunting and nomadic life to settlement of villages and animal domestication, known as ranching or stockbreeding. In the existing civilization has occurred the same with fishing and aquaculture.

The necessity of disposal of alimentary resources independently of climatology and other factors out of control has brought the necessity of improving techniques in sowing and harvest, and animal breeding.

Aquaculture, as any sector, has experienced important changes. Currently, aquaculture sector demands fish, shellfish and mollusk breeding, at competitive prices, under standard and strict controls about breeding.

It is believed that aquaculture origin took place around 3800BC in ancient China, Egypt, Babylonia, Greece, Rome and other Euro Asiatic and American cultures.
In present Western culture, aquaculture was practiced during the Middle Age in monasteries and abbeys, using ponds watered by river beds to cultivate trouts and carps.

More recently, in 1758, in Austria took place the first successful artificial fertilization of trout and salmon egg, although those investigations were left.

84 years later and without the previous information about Dr. Jacob´s investigations in 1842, French fishermen, Remy and Gehin, got viable lays of trouts, that evolved to young fish, which were bred in ponds successfully.

Nowadays, the necessity of feeding the increasing human population and the necessity of supplying them with marine food, well known for the quality of their proteins and fatty acids, independently of climatology, close season and other circumstances, has caused the evolution of this sector. Nowadays the growth of this sector requires maximum attention in all annexed sectors: alimentation, sanity, auxiliary cultivations and investigation.
Among several investigations, we can find investigations on new suitable species to be cultivated, investigations to optimize environmental parameters, investigations to optimize food depending on species needs, and investigations about how to get marine cultivations adapted to consumer demands on nutritional value, quality guarantee and security.

According to FAO (1998), the increase in aquaculture production is necessary to satisfy the increasing market demand, as well as to reduce the fishing effort. That would permit to recover overexploited fishing grounds, being able to return to the sustainable maximum performance (RMS) which is the ideal situation proposed by technicians and scientifics.

Thus, we organize this blog about aquaculture, with the aim of promoting the exchange of information and concern about this sector that will permit us to advance by improving sanity and optimizing efficiency.

Economic Importance

The evolution and growth of aquaculture sector has been continuous during last few years as a fundamental answer for conventional fishing, in order to increase the production of marine products and also to keep stable the fishing production.

Aquaculture is the subsector which has experienced the biggest growth among all the sectors which form the food production. The evolution of the production on this sector has passed from 1 million of tones in 1950 to 59.4 millions of tones in 2005. Nowadays, FAO estimates a worldwide production of 100 millions of tones.

Aquaculture is also contributing to restructure the fishing sector by absorbing work places and crafts.

We can distribute the sector by the ten most cultivated species, as it follows:

Carps And other cyprinids
Oysters
Clams
Miscellaneous freshwater fishes
Shrimps, prawns
Salmons, trouts, smelts
Mussels
Tilapias and other cichlids
Scallops, pectens
Miscellaneous marine molluscs

The distribution of production by geographical area is distributed as it follows:
Please note that first four areas, represents 70% of worldwide production.

-North Western Pacific
-Asiatic South West
-Central Western Pacific
-North Eastern Atlantic
-Eastern Indic
-Western Indic
-Central Eastern Atlantic
-North Eastern Pacific
-North Western Atlantic

We are facing a revolution in the way how to obtain, from now on, fish, shellfish and molluscs.  For this reason we will have to pay special attention on it and insist on aquacultural investigation