Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: 35-150 billion fish are raised in captivity to be released into the wild every year, published by saulius on the AI Alignment Forum. Write a Review Summary Fish stocking[1] is the practice of raising fish in hatcheries and releasing them into rivers, lakes, or the ocean. 35-150 billion finfish are stocked every year. Fish are stocked to: increase the catch in commercial fisheries (probably tens of billions of stocked fish annually), increase the catch in recreational/sport fisheries (billions of stocked fish annually), restore a population of threatened or endangered species (the number of stocked fish seems to be lower) Fish can be stocked when they are anywhere between the egg stage and multiple years old. The mean time spent in hatcheries/farms seems to be somewhere between 8 days and 4 months. Fish stocked to enhance recreational fisheries tend to be released when they are older than those stocked to enhance commercial fisheries. Usually, fish are stocked to maximize economic outputs so we shouldn’t expect fish welfare to be given sufficient consideration. It’s unclear how much hatcheries are incentivized to breed healthy and unstressed fish that would have higher survivorship after the release. Bigger fish may also starve and suffer after their release due to their lack of survival skills. I was unable to find any animal advocacy organization that is working on reducing the suffering caused by fish stocking. I found very few articles that talk about fish stocking from an animal welfare perspective.[2] Possible interventions include lobbying to decrease the number of fish stocked for recreational fishers and requiring better conditions in hatcheries. I am very uncertain if such interventions would be cost-effective compared to ACE’s recommended charities. Fish stocking has various ecological effects (e.g., a decrease in the genetic diversity of wild populations) that would need to be well-understood before seriously considering trying to reduce the number of stocked fish. Context This article is a part of a series of articles by Rethink Priorities about animals farmed for various purposes. We chose to write about this topic because it seems fairly important and it’s possible that animal advocates haven’t addressed welfare problems related to fish stocking simply because they didn’t know about them. Charity Entrepreneurship (CE) has recently released a report that considered the advantages and disadvantages of founding a charity that tackles problems related to fish stocking and baitfish. The report used my preliminary research on fish stocking, but it was written before I wrote most of this article. CE’s report provisionally concluded that interventions in these areas are only “somewhat promising” compared to other interventions they considered. I disagree with some aspects[3] of their report, but I have no opinion on whether the conclusion is correct. In general, I think that more in-depth research would be needed to determine whether this is a problem that should eventually be tackled by animal activists. I am uncertain if such research should currently be a priority. The number of fish stocked annually worldwide I haven’t found any estimates of the number of fish stocked worldwide, but I found estimates for various countries and regions: China: A 2006 programme planned to release 20 billion juvenile fish annually and to increase it to 40 billion by 2020. China’s 2011-2015 Fisheries Plan includes releasing 150 billion juvenile fish (which is 30 billion per year)[4] and claims that 109 billion young fish were released since a previous five-year plan was made in 2006.[5] It should be noted that these statistics are from China’s government and some doubt whether China’s government is a reliable source. For example, China has probably over-reported the catch from w...