The Present Status of Freshwater Aquaculture in Turkey

Tülay Altun, Arzu ÖZlÜEr, Zeynep ErÇEn, Durali DanabaŞ.

Cukurova University, Fisheries Faculty, Balcal?, Adana, Turkey.

Abstract

As the world population increased and the problems of famine become more widespread , a more efficient use of animal food resources needs to be devoleped to meet this saving problem. Fish producs can contrubite greatly to human nutrition needs and must be accepted as valuable sources of protein. Because of these reasons, like other countries Turkey has engineered It's aquacultural proceses and then all kind of aquaculture management in Turkey has grown substantially
Turkey is uniquely located surrrounded on three sides by the Mediterranean sea, the Aegean sea and Black sea. Moreover, The country has rich inland waters and river systems (178.000 km total length), appoximately, 200 natural lakes (900.000 ha) and over 180 dam lakes (355.000 ha water surface) and ( 9 × 109 m³) aquaducts. The first trout farm was established in the late 1960s. From the beginning of the 1996s to 1999 the number of licenced fresh water fish farms increased from 728 to 1120. Production is dominated by inland production, mainly of trout (Oncorhncus mykiss) , which is supplies 66% of total. In recent years, total fisheries production including aquaculture has reached 582.376 ton, these figures were provided by the Turkish Statistical Institute. Aquacultural production counts 42.572 tons of trout, 813 tons of carp with an overall fishery production of 79.031 tons.