Inside Unmanned Systems provides actionable business intelligence to decision-makers and influencers operating within the global UAS community. Features include analysis of key technologies, policy/regulatory developments and new product design.
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ENGINEERING. PRACTICE. POLICY. 45 unmanned systems inside January/February 2016 Photos courtesy of InnovaSea bass and eventually tuna. Interspersed among the pens will be equipment to grow mussels and clams, which are not only saleable but naturally help clean the water. She also has plans to grow kelp and other marketable seaweed including a particularly interesting species called dulse. "I heard that when you pan sauté it, it tastes like bacon," Lanzetta said. Part of what spurred Lanzetta to launch Manna Fish Farms—which will be the first such farm on the East Coast and perhaps the first in the entire United States—is the rising demand for food, especially protein. The world's population is projected to increase dramatically over the course of this century ris- ing from 7.3 billion in 2015 to 9.4 billion in 2050, according to projections from the U.S. Census Bureau, said Hauke Kite-Powell of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). Earlier pro- jections for the maximum human population on the globe also have been resized upwards, he said. "We're definitely poised to exceed the 9 bil- lion mark before too long and that means a lot more people to feed, he told a Jan. 11 workshop on aquaculture organized by WHOI's Center for Marine Robotics. Not only is the number of people growing, the demand per-person for protein is rising as people become more affluent. "Seafood demand is growing and at a macro level it is driven by an increase in the rising mid- dle class from the growing Third World," said David Kelly, the chief technology officer for In- novaSea, which builds mariculture equipment. "As the middle class rises, the demand for pro- tein goes up—the demand for protein goes up, fish goes with it." Given these trends, said Kite-Powell, "it's likely that we're going to need about another probably 2 million tons of live seafood in the U.S. by 2050 and globally more than 40 mil- lion tons per year." It has been years since the wild fish supply has been able to meet demand, he told attendees. "As far as seafood protein is concerned," Kite-Powell explained, "the wild capture fish- eries of the world stopped keeping pace with increased demand for seafood as of two de- cades ago—two and a half decades ago—and all of the growth in global seafood production since then has effectively come from fish farm- ing, from aquaculture. And there's no reason World Population Growth 2015: 7.3 billion 2050: 9.4 billion Source: US Census Bureau fast fact BY THE NUMBERS $25 to $30 million The typical cost to build an open ocean farm including a hatchery and processing plant. 190,000 square km 2 The amount of ocean with the right depth, temperature, currents and proximity to a port to be well suited to open ocean farming. Nearly all of this space is still available. Sources in order: David Kelly, InnovaSea; United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization