Aquaculture

The City of San Diego's water department received preliminary approval Wednesday to expand and move its experimental aquaculture plant from Mission Valley to the San Pasqual Valley, where treated sewage water will be sold for agricultural use. The City Council's Public Services and Safety Committee voted unanimously to approve the relocation of the water hyacinth plant, making possible the first large-scale commercial reuse of recycled sewage water.

In Vietnam there's a kind of fish that's white-fleshed and whiskered and otherwise pretty darn catfish-like. But in the eyes of the U.S. government, the creatures aren't catfish. Now fish farmers in the American South fear this government classification will allow the Vietnamese fish to slither around inspection regulations that will soon apply to American catfish. It's one of many reasons fish farmer Scott Kiker is singing the catfish blues.

Aquaculture's strides toward becoming a reliable source of scarce seafood species are evident from a Central California shellfish operation's recent announcement. Last week, the Abalone Farm Inc., of Point Estero, harvested its one-millionth commercial-sized abalone. The milestone is significant because the mollusks have proved difficult to cultivate, and, as a result, there are less than half-a-dozen such operations currently in existence.

Here are some questions put to the California Department of Transportation about the foliage along the freeways in North County. Just whose idea was it to plant trees and shrubs along the freeways? The trees and shrubs you see along North County's freeways today are the products of the vision of a woman in the White House 25 years ago. Making America's highways more aesthetically pleasing was the pet project of former First Lady Lady Bird Johnson.

The name "Cousteau" is traditionally associated with the men of the family: Jacques, the patriarch and worldwide symbol of marine exploration, who died in 1997, and sons Philippe, who died in 1979, and Jean-Michel, head of Ocean Futures and owner of a Fiji Islands adventure resort. Now Jacques' 25-year-old granddaughter, Alexandra, is poised to claim a piece of the Cousteau legend. She's not the first female Cousteau to devote her life to the ocean.

MEXICO CITY - Somewhere underneath the hull of Armando Tovar's boat, the aquatic manifestation of the great god Xolotl was slithering along the muddy canal bottom, digesting bugs, laying eggs and trying to avoid extinction. Even though he could not see the creature, Tovar knew it would be confronting its troubled environment with that weird fixed smile, the one that makes it appear to be in on some cosmic joke. As a 9-inch salamander, of course, the ajolote (pronounced ah-ho-LO-tay)

Early on an overcast Saturday, Rudolphe Streichenberger dons scuba gear to check on his private reef. In contrast to the day, his mood is bright: He is returning to the scene of a crime that may turn out not to be illegal after all. Last year, Streichenberger sued the California Coastal Commission, which had ordered him to remove the 2-acre reef he and colleagues had built more than a decade ago off Newport Beach as an aquaculture venture.

Down on Dick Glenn's farm, the animals aren't kept in pens. Heck, they're not going anywhere. They move very slowly, and their pastures are all under water. Glenn is the president and owner of Seafarms West, Southern California's only mussel and oyster farm. He and a partner launched the venture 18 months ago in the shallow waters of Agua Hedionda lagoon, and Seafarms West now harvests thousands of the tasty little mollusks every week.

Just look at what it does. It gives you more growing space than the land it occupies. It creates a tropical environment at 7,100 feet in the Rockies with no energy used--year-round. And it can be very cheaply built with hand tools." --Energy consultant Amory Lovins, director of the Rocky Mountain Institute, describing the "biodome" at Windstar Foundation, a half mile from his home.

"This is the future," says John Davis as he points to the Aqua Hedionda Lagoon a few steps from the main coastal road. "All of our seafood will eventually come from aquaculture. . . . The opportunities are unbelievable." It certainly doesn't look like much. Dozens of bored, brown pelicans perch on white plastic jugs that bob on the water. The crude buoys and their supports look like a low-tech extension of the adjacent power plant.