How mariculture expansion is dewilding the ocean and its inhabitants.

Abstract

The world's oceans are largely free from intensive farming, but momentum to intensify and expand mariculture-the cultivation of aquatic organisms in the ocean-is growing. Despite optimism that mariculture will create economic and nutritional benefits for humans, it can also generate a host of risks, including environmental degradation, harms to wildlife integrity and welfare, captivity effects, and shifts in how humans view the nonhuman world. Collectively, we refer to these four types of risks as "dewilding." In this systematic review, we searched Scopus and Web of Science for recent literature documenting mariculture's dewilding impacts to organize and collate this evidence under one unified framework. We find that mariculture's dewilding impacts are consistently documented, though often in isolation, and that captivity and conceptual dewilding impacts are recognized as potential harms far less than impacts on the environment and wildlife. Future work examining mariculture's dewilding impacts will be paramount to guiding human decision-making and activity going forward.