question: Why can't we just breed tiny fish babies en masse and dump them in the ocean to solve overfishing?
comment: Everything you say is reasonable until you get to the "Assuming that someone is willing to pay for all this." It would be expensive for the government or whatever organization did that and with the cost passed along to the consumer, prices of fish would put people off from buying them. "Have marine authorities enforce a "no fishing" season." Lol. This would mean an incredible amount of resources would need to be thrown at the problem. Understand just how big oceans are. Plus... let's say there is a scenario where the government actually spends the money ($$$$$$$) to do this. You don't want to actually start a war over fishing rights. No country has "dominion over the oceans" and you would need a world-wide fishing ban which isn't EVER going to happen.
passages: Roaming cages have been envisioned as the "next generation technology" for offshore aquaculture. These are large mobile cages powered by thrusters and able to take advantage of ocean currents. One idea is that juvenile tuna, starting out in mobile cages in Mexico, could reach Japan after a few months, matured and ready for the market. However, implementing such ideas will have regulatory and legal implications.
  
  Section::::Space conflicts.
   Several trials are underway for land-based "Seriola" culture, but currently most "Seriola" fish are produced in cages, either in nearshore pens or in high-technology, submersible cages out in the open ocean. They are fed a range of diets, from trash fish to basic compound feeds to complex, formulated, compound feeds.
  
  As is the case with the majority of aquaculture species, the farming of "Seriola" has associated environmental or other impacts. 
  
  BULLET::::- Capture of wild stocks for culture (juveniles/broodstock for hatcheries) can have direct impacts on associated populations and ecosystems.
   Fish farming can enclose the entire breeding cycle of the fish, with fish being bred in captivity. Some fish prove difficult to breed in captivity and can be caught in the wild as juveniles and brought into captivity to increase their weight. With scientific progress more species are being made to breed in captivity. This was the case with southern bluefin tuna, which were first bred in captivity in 2009.
  
  Section::::Mitigation.:Consumer awareness.
   The fishing down the food web is something that occurs when overfishing arises. Once all larger fish are caught, the fisherman will start to fish the smaller individuals, which would lead to more fish needing to be caught to keep up with demand. This decreases fish populations, as well as genetic diversity of the species, making them more susceptible to disease, and less likely to adapt to their stressors and the environment. Additionally, catching smaller fish leads to breeding of smaller offspring, which can be problematic for fish. In many species, the smaller the female, the less fecund it is, impacting the fish population.
   In 2008 a large scale study of fisheries that used individual transferable quotas and ones that didn't provided strong evidence that individual transferable quotas can help to prevent collapses and restore fisheries that appear to be in decline.
  
  Fish farming has been proposed as a more sustainable alternative to traditional capture of wild fish. However, fish farming has been found to have negative impacts on nearby wild fish and farming of predatory fish like salmon can rely on fish feed that is based on fish meal and oil from wild fish.
  
  Section::::Countermeasures.:Marine reserves.
   Traditional management practices aim to reduce the number of old, slow-growing fish, leaving more room and resources for younger, faster-growing fish. Most marine fish produce huge numbers of eggs. The assumption was that younger spawners would produce plenty of viable larvae.
   However, 2005 research on rockfish shows that large, elderly females are far more important than younger fish in maintaining productive fisheries. The larvae produced by these older maternal fish grow faster, survive starvation better, and are much more likely to survive than the offspring of younger fish. Failure to account for the role of older fish may help explain recent collapses of some major US West Coast fisheries. Recovery of some stocks is expected to take decades. One way to prevent such collapses is to establish marine reserves, where fishing is not allowed and fish populations age naturally.
  
  Section::::Data quality.
   In 2009, researchers in Australia managed to coax southern bluefin tuna to breed in landlocked tanks, raising the possibility that fish farming may be able to save the species from overfishing.
  
  Section::::See also.
  
  IUCN Red List
  
  BULLET::::- Lists of IUCN Red List endangered species
  
  BULLET::::- List of endangered amphibians
  
  BULLET::::- List of endangered arthropods
  
  BULLET::::- List of endangered birds
  
  BULLET::::- List of endangered fishes
  
  BULLET::::- List of endangered insects
  
  BULLET::::- List of endangered invertebrates
  
  BULLET::::- List of endangered mammals
  
  BULLET::::- List of endangered molluscs
  
  BULLET::::- List of endangered reptiles
  
  BULLET::::- List of Chromista by conservation status
   "Smart" FADs include sonar and GPS capabilities so that the operator can remotely contact it via satellite to determine the population under the FAD.
  
  Section::::Scope.
   Once a high performing tilapia strain (or strains) has been developed, the establishment of satellite hatcheries will increase the availability and decrease the costs of seed stock. These public and private hatcheries will act as multipliers for the superior genetics developed at RGCA and the sites for dissemination of quality broodstock to fish farmers.
   Another possible solution, at least for some areas, is quotas, so fishermen can only legally take a certain amount of fish. A more radical possibility is declaring certain areas of the sea "no-go zones" and make fishing there strictly illegal, so the fish in that area have time to recover and repopulate.
  
  In order to maximise resources some countries (e.g. Bangladesh and Thailand) have improved the availability of family planning services. The resulting smaller populations have a decreased environmental footprint and less food needs to provided.
   "There is surely a better way for governments to spend money than by paying subsidies to a fleet that burns 1.1 billion litres of fuel annually to maintain paltry catches of old growth fish from highly vulnerable stocks, while destroying their habitat in the process" – "Pauly".
  
  "Eliminating global subsidies would render these fleets economically unviable and would relieve tremendous pressure on over-fishing and vulnerable deep-sea ecosystems" – "Sumaila".
  
  Section::::Mitigation.:Minimizing fishing impact.
   Even worse, there is no significant improvement of household revenue in short term by setting up a marine reserve, it is hoped that the approach is likely to bring a much bigger impact on targeted fisheries in a mid and long term exploitation. From a biological point of view, a larger female octopus for example tends to lay many more eggs than young ones. By providing a few more months to grow in a closed fishing ground, it allows octopus individuals to get to bigger sizes.
   From 2011, a team from the University of Waterloo led by Tahbit Chowdhury and Gordon Graff examined vertical RAS aquaculture designs aimed at producing protein-rich fish species. However, because of its high capital and operating costs, RAS has generally been restricted to practices such as broodstock maturation, larval rearing, fingerling production, research animal production, specific pathogen-free animal production, and caviar and ornamental fish production. As such, research and design work by Chowdhury and Graff remains difficult to implement. Although the use of RAS for other species is considered by many aquaculturalists to be currently impractical, some limited successful implementation of RAS has occurred with high-value product such as barramundi, sturgeon, and live tilapia in the US, eels and catfish in the Netherlands, trout in Denmark and salmon is planned in Scotland and Canada.
   Section::::Ecological impacts.:Wild caught feed.
  
  As with the inshore aquaculture of carnivorous fish, a large proportion of the feed comes from wild forage fish. Except for a few countries, offshore aquaculture has focused predominantly on high value carnivorous fish. If the industry attempts to expand with this focus then the supply of these wild fish will become ecologically unsustainable.
  
  Section::::Ecological impacts.:Fish escapes.
   Semi-submersible marine technology is beginning to impact fish farming. In 2018, 1.5 million salmon are in the middle of a year-long trial at Ocean Farm 1 off the coast of Norway. The semi-submersible project is the worlds first deep-sea aquaculture project, and includes -high by -diameter pen made from a series of mesh-wire frames and nets, designed to disperse wastes better than more conventional farms in sheltered coastal waters, and therefore, be able to support higher fish packing density.
  
  Section::::Fish farms.:Cage system.:Copper-alloy nets.
   If there was a specific amount of fish that people were allowed to catch then this could very well solve the problem of over fishing. This type of limit system is in place in a few countries including New Zealand, Norway, Canada, and the United States. In these countries the limit system has successfully helped in fishing industries. These types of limit systems are called Individual fishing quota. This means that the areas where this quota exist, the government has legal entity over it and in these boundaries they are entitled to utilize their ocean resources as they wish.
   BULLET::::- 2015: sardine populations crashed along the west coast of the United States.
  
  Section::::Recent reports.
  
  BULLET::::- Pikitch E and 12 others (2012) Little Fish, Big Impact: Managing a Crucial Link in Ocean Food Webs "Lenfest Ocean Program", Washington, DC. Summary and other materials available on the Lenfest Ocean Program website.
  
  Section::::See also.
  
  BULLET::::- Foraging
  
  BULLET::::- Optimal foraging theory
  
  BULLET::::- The Blue Planet
  
  Section::::External links.
  
  BULLET::::- Herring Research: Using Acoustics to Count Fish.
  
  BULLET::::- Sanders, Michael (1995) "Impacts of predator–prey relationships on harvesting strategies and management" FAO.
   BULLET::::- There are environmental concerns over certain feeds used (fishmeal, oils, trash fish, etc.) for cultured carnivorous or piscivorous species.
  
  BULLET::::- Disease is always of great concern within cultured species in terms of introduction and/or amplification of pathogens and parasites and subsequent infection of wild fish, as well as between farms.
  
  BULLET::::- Escape of cultured fish is also a concern, which can have effects on wild stocks in terms of competition, predation and genetic alterations, depending on vulnerability and robustness.
   Care is needed when applying population dynamics to real world fisheries. In the past, over-simplistic modelling, such as ignoring the size, age and reproductive status of the fish, focusing solely on a single species, ignoring bycatch and physical damage to the ecosystem, has accelerated the collapse of key stocks.
  
  Section::::Ecosystem based fisheries.
   Hatchery facilities present three main problems in the field of genetics. The first is that maintenance of a small number of broodstock can cause inbreeding and potentially lead to inbreeding depression thus affecting the success of the facility. Secondly, hatchery reared juveniles, even from a fairly large broodstock, can have greatly reduced genetic diversity compared to wild populations (the situation is comparable to the founder effect). Such fish that escape from farms or are released for restocking purposes may adversely affect wild population genetics and viability. This is of particular concern where escaped fish have been actively bred or are otherwise genetically modified. The third key issue is that genetic modification of food items is highly undesirable for many people. See Genetically modified food controversies.
   Drifting FADs are widespread in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian ocean purse seine fisheries. They catch over 1 million tons of tuna (nearly one-third of the global tuna total) and over 100,000 tons of by-catch in the vicinity of FADs as of 2005. Skipjack "Katsuwonus pelamis", Bigeye tuna "Thunnus obesus" and yellowfin "Thunnus albacares" tuna are the three primary tropical tuna species that FADs target. Other fish include albacore, dolphin fish, wahoo, blue marlin, striped marlin, mako shark, silky shark, whitetip shark, galapagos shark, mackerel, and 
  
  bonito.
   Increasing quantities of high-grade tuna are reared in net pens and fed bait fish. In Australia, former fishermen raise southern bluefin tuna, "Thunnus maccoyii", and another bluefin species. Farming its close relative, the Atlantic bluefin tuna, "Thunnus thynnus", is beginning in the Mediterranean, North America and Japan. Hawaii approved permits for the first U.S. offshore farming of bigeye tuna in water deep in 2009.
   Care is needed when applying population dynamics to real world fisheries. Over-simplistic modelling of fisheries has resulted in the collapse of key stocks.
  
  Section::::History.
   Section::::Synopsis.
  
  Two friends, Ted Caplow (an ecological engineer) and Andy Danylchuk
  
  They visit a high tech seabass farm, partly automated and equipped with video surveillance. While this is one of the more efficient ways of raising fish since the fish farmers can use the minimum amount of feed to fatten their fish, it is very expensive. It also causes a lot of waste and pollution with excess feed and fish waste falling below the cage.
  
presuppositions: Breeding tiny fish to solve overfishing is a practical solution. It's practical to breed fish en masse and dump them in the ocean.
corrections: The ocean is too big and it would be too expensive to just breed tiny fish and dump them in the ocean. It's prohibitively expensive to breed fish en masse and dump them in the ocean.
raw_presuppositions: Breeding tiny fish to solve overfishing is a practical solution. It's practical to breed fish en masse and dump them in the ocean.
raw_corrections: The ocean is too big and it would be too expensive to just breed tiny fish and dump them in the ocean. It's prohibitively expensive to breed fish en masse and dump them in the ocean.