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Maine Biz - Fishing for a Future
By Whit Richardson
25th January, 2010
"While the tools may be new, the idea of farming the oceans is not. That prescient explorer of the deep blue, Jacques Cousteau, promoted farming the oceans in the early 1970s. “With Earth’s burgeoning human populations to feed, we must turn to the sea with new understanding and new technology,” Cousteau said in his 1973 television show “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.” “We need to farm it as we farm the land.” One pioneer of the offshore aquaculture movement close to fulfilling Cousteau’s vision is Brian O’Hanlon, a 30-year-old New Yorker who grew up in a family of seafood dealers.."
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Irish America Honors Environmental Executives
By Kara Rota
16th December, 2009
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The Ecologist
By Edward Helmore
20th October, 2009
Eight miles from the Caribbean coast of Panama, bobbing on several hundred feet of pristine ocean, 29-year-old Brian O'Hanlon surveys the grand expanse of his opportunity. 'This is the future,' he says with the confidence and, in this heavy swell, the enviable sea-legs of a man with two generations of New York's Fulton Street fishmongering business in his blood.
Free-Range Fish Farmer: Brian O’Hanlon, Open Blue Sea Farms CEO, observing his stock of cobia swimming in a submerged containment dome, which can reach heights of 15 stories or more, beneath the Caribbean off the coast of Panama. Open Blue’s “free-range” aquaculture methods hold sea life in its natural environment while decreasing risk of disease, greatly reducing ecological impact and cultivating a superior dining product.
O'Hanlon, a marine biologist by training, is preparing to embark on a project that promises a revolution in the troubled fish farming business and, with it, the chance to begin to curb the critical over-exploitation of the world's ocean fisheries.
Reconciling the dual instincts of the fish trader and the ecologist is not simple. As a fish-trader, O'Hanlon has watched the collapse of stocks of salmon, snapper, cod, grouper, halibut, skate and Chilean sea bass; as an ecologist, he's watching as species like tuna and swordfish are pushed close to extinction, and industrial fleets fish ever farther down the trophic scale toward jellyfish and plankton in the search for protein.
As global demand for fish increases and wild stocks decline, an estimated production shortfall conservatively estimated at 35 million tons a year over the coming...
