Aquaculture is the fastest-growing food production sector globally, making the adoption of sustainable practices essential for both economic and environmental well-being. A major challenge to continued growth in this area is minimizing ecological impacts while maximizing production, particularly the risks associated with farmed fish, such as genetic introgression and ecological imbalances caused by escapes. One effective solution is the use of technologies to produce reproductively sterile fish.
Sterility ensures that farmed fish cannot reproduce, preventing accidental breeding or overpopulation, which can strain resources and space on a farm. It also reduces the risk of escapes by ensuring that accidental introductions cannot reproduce in the wild, thus protecting natural ecosystems. Additionally, sterility can be used to address regulatory inefficiencies and instill confidence in permitting and environmental review of aquaculture both onshore and at sea.
Sterile fish also offer significant benefits for farm management and productivity. By redirecting energy and nutrients that would typically go into reproductive development toward somatic growth, sterility can improve fillet quality or yield and overall farm productivity. Farms can more easily maintain and control desirable genetic traits without the risks of unplanned crossbreeding or genetic drift, ensuring consistent and high-quality product output. Moreover, sterility helps reduce the risk of disease transmission through breeding, enabling farms to maintain a healthier and more biosecure environment by preventing the introduction of new genetic material or pathogens through broodstock. It also simplifies farm management by eliminating the need for special husbandry practices to prevent maturation during the grow-out cycle.
Traditional methods like triploidy and interspecific hybridization are sometimes used to achieve sterility, but newer approaches aim for 100% sterility with fewer negative effects on fish performance. Advances in molecular and genetic technologies, such as gene silencing and genome editing, offer promising non-transgenic methods to induce sterility in some candidate species. These innovations, including immersion-based sterilization techniques, present new opportunities to enhance biosecurity and sustainability in aquaculture while protecting intellectual property and proprietary genetic resources.