Clearly Comparing Capture Fisheries and Culture Fisheries: 6 Stunning Facts

You are here probably because you intend to know all about the major differences between Capture fisheries and Culture fisheries. Based on our intensive research, I have assembled all you need to know about these types of fisheries, and have presented them, and compared the similarities and differences among them.

This brief is a comparison of Capture fisheries with Culture fisheries. If you intend to know more about the word fishery, read this page on fisheries. For more other fisheries types, read all major types of fisheries.

1. Comparing Capture fisheries with Culture fisheries

Capture fisheries:

This type of fishery deals with the catching/harvesting of uncultured edible living aquatic resources from the wild. Capture fishery is synonymous with fishing in most contexts.

Culture fisheries:

This type of fishery deals with culturing edible living aquatic resources in a natural environment like rivers, lakes, streams, etc. Culture fishery is synonymous with culture-based or farmed fisheries in most contexts. In contrast to aquaculture which involves the cultivation of aquatic life within controlled environments or the commercial production of certain aquatic species by managing the major part of their life history under strict control, culture-based fisheries increase production in natural environments by controlling a part of the life history of certain species and transplanting or releasing their seed or fry into the open waters (source: Honma, 1980).

2. Similarities between Capture fisheries and Culture fisheries

Similarities between capture fisheries and culture fisheries:

• Both capture fisheries and culture fisheries produce living aquatic resource
• Capture fisheries and culture fisheries are all subsectors of the fisheries sector
• Culture and capture fisheries can be practised in both inland and marine water
• Culture and capture fisheries obtain both fin and shellfish.

2. Differences between Capture fisheries and Culture fisheries

While Culture and capture fisheries are similar in many ways, they differ in a few ways:

1. In culture fisheries, the resources are obtained through farming, culture or rearing through fish farming, algaculture, etc., while capture fisheries resources are caught/harvested from their natural environment.
2. Capture fisheries is carried out mostly in natural environments like lakes, rivers, and streams, while culture fisheries is done in a controlled artificial environment like ponds, floating cages, tanks, raceways, etc.
3. ‘Capture fisheries’ requires little or no feeding input.  while ‘culture fisheries’ requires more input on labour, feeding, etc
4. Natural fish recruitment is faster with ‘Capture fisheries’ than with ‘culture fisheries’ since the fish reproduce much easier in their natural environment. Culture fisheries systems and techniques do not often give room for the natural recruitment of young.
5. ‘Capture fishery’ has little or no control over the organisms’ development, as opposed to ‘culture fisheries’  where factors like water velocity, salinity, pH, dissolved oxygen, etc. are managed for optimum yields.
6. ‘Capture fishery’ is synonymous with wild fisheries, wild-caught fisheries, and wild-capture fisheries while ‘culture fishery’ is synonymous with farmed fisheries, culture-based fisheries