Hi, we got an interesting question on our facebook page:
If aquaponics is performed with shellfish, any chance the plants from such a system could affect someone with a shellfish allergy?
Kind of a 2 part question.
Firstly there are no safe bivalves that can be raised in Aquaponics currently. They all have issues. For starters they strip calcium from the water faster than any plant. They also clog plumbing if they spawn. Secondly most have a parasitic life stage where they feed on fish blood via latching onto there gills as is the case for most fresh water muscles. Thirdly shellfish allergy is generally from consumption of tropomyosin which doesn’t just leech into the water in a live system so unless they cooked harvested food with it even if they were live in the system it should not be an issue as the concentration potential in any plant tissue would be nothing.
great, thank you for this.
I have a follow-up question to this: if the fish in a system were fed on live shrimp could this impact someone with a crustacean allergy eating the fish?
Logic would suggest not, because otherwise they would be allergic to to all wild caught and some farmed salmon, but I’m curious to see if anyone had a definitive answer.
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No the plants won’t uptake anything from the shellfish that would be an allergen.
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