Yonathan Zohar loves fish. He likes cooking them, he likes eating them, he could watch them swim for hours. But most of all, he likes to grow them.
In a nondescript warehouse on the waterfront in Fells Point, Zohar is growing lots of fish -- in one tank, more than 100, 2-pound juvenile rockfish swim in swift unison, building up their muscles. Nearby, breeder fish, weighing up to 45 pounds (that would be Bertha) meander around, too content to chase the food pellets Zohar tosses into the water.
It isn't obvious from this industrial setting, with all its wires and pipes and conduits and containers of all sizes, but Zohar and his fish are on the leading edge of a culinary revolution.
Thanks to overfishing of U.S. waters, increased demand at American tables, and a lack of a natural supply of the fish most people consider fit to eat, there's a declining supply of wild fish to meet current demand. With Zohar's research, and with the knowledge and experience currently being gained, a new industry is taking shape: that of raising food fish in captivity -- fish-farming, or aquaculture.
"The USDA says 70 percent of marine fish are over-exploited or depleted," Zohar said recently at the sparkling new University of Maryland marine biotechnology facility at Columbus Center at the Inner Harbor, where he is a professor and aquaculture coordinator. "At the same time, consumption is growing."
Nutritionists and health professionals are encouraging people to eat fish because it is a good source of protein and it is low in fat, and has the "right" kind of fat (omega-3 fatty acid) that doesn't exacerbate heart problems.
"Because of the continuing increase in consumption," Zohar said, "there is an increasing gap between demand and supply." Estimates are that the demand for fish and seafood will double in the next two decades, while the supply of fish from the wild will at the most stay the same, he said.
So, after slowly gaining speed in the last two decades, fish-farming is now racing toward becoming a big business. In 1984, U.S. production was 167,864 tons; by 1994, the figure was up to 332,817 tons, according to the National Marine Fisheries Service of the U.S. Commerce Department.
