For those of you who aren't on my Facebook, here's something I just published:

Fact: Tilapia has very little fat, calories, carbs, or sodium, and is an excellent source of Phosphorus, Niacin, Selenium, B12 and Potassium.
Fact: Tilapia sells like hotcakes in gourmet stores and high-end fish markets.
Fact: Tilapia consume over 6 times their own mass in other fish's fecal matter.
Fact: Tilapia are #99 on the IUCN's 100 of the World's Worst Alien Invasive Species list.

It is a healthy fish to eat, but at what cost?
They are widely used as biological control for aquatic plant problems.
The fish is known as a "[censored]" in most aquatic circles, and is also a problematic invasive species that will take over most new territories.
"'Arizona stocks tilapia in the canals that serve as the drinking water sources for the cities of Phoenix, Mesa and others. The fish help purify the water by consuming vegetation and detritus, greatly reducing purification costs."
Arizona also dumps their sewage into canals that then feed into water-treatment plants to be purified into drinking water. The tilapia feed on the sewage and act as a biological [censored]. They'll also eat the algae that grows rampant in the canals from high-levels of waste-nutrients.

On the other hand, they also purify the water from such things, which causes other species of fish to grow in population, size and health. However, since the fish are flourishing on account of an "outside" source and not from their own accord, this could lead to problems later when the pond/aquatic area is over-stocked on the natural fish. But by that time, the tilapia would have reproduced beyond controllable numbers and would need to expand their "zone" to accommodate their numbers. Pushing themselves upstream, they'll be interfering and disrupting the aquatic life-cycle in that area as well. But on the sewage treatment issue, the tilapia are a much more viable way of cleaning than using various chemicals and is a much cheaper solution. The treatment plants can also be cheaper to build and maintain, as there's less waste to be pushed through and processed by human methods.

Then again, if we're talking about farmed fish, this is a whole different story. Sort of.
Salmon fisheries use tilapia to clean the holding pens. What does this mean? Fisheries usually have 1/3 of their holding pens empty for moving fish around. When a pen gets too dirty to keep salmon in, they'll migrate them to a different holding pen, then push tilapia into the previously occupied area to clean. Since the tilapia love eating other fish's waste, they're in heaven while in the dirty, [censored] pen. They can also hold about 4x more tilapia per volume in a pen than salmon, so there's usually as much tilapia in a fishery as there are salmon, even though there may only be one or two pens for the tilapia.

So my question to you is this: do you feel comfortable eating fish that thrive off other fish's fecal matter, is on the World's Worst Invasive Species List, and acts as a living scrub-brush to clean dirty water?

I used to like it. It has a nice flavor and is a very firm fish compared to something like Cod or even Halibut. When you cook it, there's very little sweating that the meat does, which means there's very little waste in the cooking. However, after my boss told it the fisheries use tilapia to clean the salmon pens, I kinda got turned off from it.

It tastes good, is very cheap, and is easy as [censored] to cook... but I can't eat something that I know has basically spent it's life sucking the *** of another fish.

not a big fan of fish unless its properly smoked salmon

Salmon and some haddock is all the fish I eat.

Thank's Zeph... I'll never eat Tilapia again... :barf:

glad i dont eat seafood

I don't eat much fish for some reason, but i don't see why a biological resource can't be used. The other option would be what? Chlorination?

battlechaser wrote:Thank's Zeph... I'll never eat Tilapia again... :barf:

You should see what the US has for the food machine that feed our fatasses. Watch Food INC

1CUPyellow wrote:I don't eat much fish for some reason, but i don't see why a biological resource can't be used. The other option would be what? Chlorination?

I've got nothing against that... but when they pull the fish out and throw it on our plates after it's been eating our [censored] (literally), it kinda turns me off a little bit.