Founding a Nonprofit, Aquaculture, and Turning Research Into a Career with Wasseem Emam

Laura and Nic interview Wasseem Emam, founder and head of research at Ethical Seafood Research, to explore fish welfare, ethical aquaculture, and what it takes to build a career around an emerging and often misunderstood cause. From shrimp sentience to sustainable seafood systems, this episode dives into how research, policy, and cultural perspectives can reshape the way we think about aquatic animals and the food on our plates.

Welcome back to Environmental Professionals Radio, Connecting the Environmental Professionals Community Through Conversation, with your hosts Laura Thorne and Nic Frederick! 

Help us continue to create great content! If you’d like to sponsor a future episode hit the support podcast button or visit www.environmentalprofessionalsradio.com/sponsor-form 

Please be sure to ✔️subscribe, ⭐rate and ✍review. 

This podcast is produced by the National Association of Environmental Professions (NAEP). Check out all the NAEP has to offer at NAEP.org.

Connect with Wasseem Emam at wasseem@ethicalseafoodresearch.org and https://www.linkedin.com/in/wasseem-emam/. 

Guest Bio:
Wasseem Emam is the founder and Executive Director of Ethical Seafood Research, a Scottish-, Spanish-, Kenyan- and Egyptian-registered nonprofit working to improve the welfare of aquatic animals across food systems of the Global South, with active programs in Egypt, Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria and Spain. Originally from Egypt, but having spent most of his career in the UK, Canada and now Spain, he has built his career around a question the food and environmental sectors have long overlooked: whether the billions of aquatic animals caught up in the food system each year have lives worth living.

Music Credits
Intro: Givin Me Eyes by Grace Mesa
Outro: Never Ending Soul Groove by Mattijs Muller

Transcript

Hello and welcome to EPR as your favorite environmental enthusiast, Nic and Laura.

On today's episode, we talk about shrimp having feelings. We interview Waee Maam about founding a nonprofit, aquaculture, and turning research into a career.

And finally, here are some facts about the seafood industry. Aquaculture farmed seafood overtook wild catch fisheries for the first time in 2022, producing about 130.9 million metric tons versus roughly 94.4 million for wild capture. So most of the world's seafood is now farmed rather than caught.

Wow. Yeah, which I did not know. That's wild.

Americans get most of their seafood from abroad. An estimated 70 to 80% of the seafood consumed in the US is imported, with Canada being the single largest provider.

Wow, I did not know either of those things.

Yeah, oh, we, we've got one more, so here we go. Dutch Harbor, Alaska of Deadliest Catch fame, those of you who know that show, has held the title for the number one US fishing port by volume for 25 consecutive years. Landing 613.5 million pounds of seafood in 2022.

Wow.

So how about that?

That is a lot of food.

Yeah, I'm putting a lot of wows in here.

Yeah, I know, right? Hit that music.

We rely on our listeners and our sponsors to bring you a new episode of Environmental Professionals Radio every week. With over 250 episodes and the show being in the top 5% of all podcasts, there's never been a better time for your company to showcase its work through a sponsorship to reach out to our highly engaged community of environmental professionals. Find out more on our sponsor page at www.environmentalprofessionalsradio.com.

Let's get to our segment. So we're talking about shrimp because we learned something new on this episode.

I know, I feel like this is, I don't want to say you're happy that I learned this, but I, I think, um, I'm not, not smiling.

Yeah, exactly.

I can tell that it brings you some joy, um, but yeah, there is apparently a growing scientific, and I'm, I'm saying apparently there is growing scientific evidence that suggests shrimps, shrimps, that shrimp can feel pain and experience distress. Which points towards their capacity for basic sentence, which I did not know until our interview and can't now unknow. So thank you for that and no disassemble Johnny 5, yeah, you read about it, yeah, yeah, uh, when they get hurt they groom or rub the injured spot or try to the harm like they understand what's happening. They can remem learn and remember, remember things and then avoid them later.

Yeah, so that's the thing, and it's, they're not the only crustaceans that that can feel that way. So cool. Those of you that were eating shrimp and you're like, I'm good, morally. Think again. I mean, like most people, you know, we've known pigs are very smart for a very long time. Anybody from still going to eat them, yeah, but it was an interesting interview. We did have a lot of conversation about that kind of thing where like the animal that we use, animals that we accept as edible vary by culture, and you know, talking about Spain and eating horse meat and here, if you even suggest that, that would be kind of, you know, it's taboo.

We both kind of gasped when you said it, yeah.

So it's interesting how that goes, and it's hard to be confronted with that sometimes, and, and honestly I think it's something that everybody should be aware of. Like this is where your food comes from, this is what your food is when you order it, this is what it is. It's not just a, it doesn't materialize out of the air, it comes from somewhere. And so yeah, it was kind of an interesting revelation. I just did not think that that would be something I learned today. That's that kind of a shock.

Wow, yeah, I've been thinking about it, you know, since, so yeah.

Yeah, and their whole thing is not that they're trying to convince people not to eat fish. That's not the point, right? It's more of the ethical treatment. We have ethical treatment, you know, you can buy organic eggs and free range and all that, and people more generally consider, you know, the quality of life of more of the birds and mammals type of meat, but they Generally don't consider much, but I think you should. I mean, fish to me, like I don't eat it obviously, but like to me you should be very concerned just health wise of how healthy, happy was this thing you are eating, because it's in your DNA, it's in your flesh, and it would be with an animal or fish also, and like he mentioned, what was it salmon?

Yeah, salmon have just the same as like a uh inbred dog. Has health issues, so do the fish, and I think that's concerning.

Yeah, and honestly I, I would say most like aquaculture folks, like people who are trying to raise farm raised fish and all that, they want their salmon to be healthy and happy, and that's kind of like because they're they're they they're fish, you know, I mean like. But that's the kind of stuff they learn and when we talk to people like uh Wasseem, that's kind of how you, how you learn sometimes like the ethical treatment of animals makes it a better thing, better product for people in the long run too. So there's stuff that, you know, it seems like why would you care about this, why talk about this? It's just a fish, but I think we've all had stories like that, but it does, it does impact how things grow and how they develop, and I think, you know, we talked about tilapia too and, and the standards for how they. Are kept have changed drastically from when they started, and I think a lot of that is because of what we're talking about, um, yeah, yeah.

But to that point, the other thing I think is amazing is he's really just taken something he felt strongly about and run with it, despite, you know, I'm sure lots of criticism or judgments or, you know, just like, why are you bothering to defend fish, you know, and I think that's amazing. I really admire that he's doing that.

Yeah, and I mean like the sentiment is not, I mean, like I worked on a project where we came out of a river to avoid sturgeon habitat, right? Like that was the whole point of coming out of the river and it was a transmission line, it was going to be buried. But it had to come out of the river and around the spawning habitat and back end because they didn't want the sedimentation from that to to harm the fish, and it can do that. It can, you know, ruin the, uh, the sturgeon are endangered, and so it's really important to do that. And the community where we came out demanded, not asked, demanded that we have a public meeting. You will meet with us. And so we did, and their first thing is like what they said was like, we don't want. You to ruin our lives for a freaking fish and like it was that kind of thing. I mean that was that was what the baseline sentiment was and you know a lot of that was just coming in with understanding like hey you you guys are misunderstanding what we're doing and why, but that's OK and so we'll talk about it and we'll be as transparent as we can be. This is going to be buried 20 ft underground, you won't notice it. It's 6 inches wide. It'll be OK, um, so we can both not bother you. And protect the fish. We can do both things. And so I think after we explained it, it was fine, but the starting point was, who cares about a fish, right? That's exactly what the sentiment was. So that's not an easy thing for him to do.

No, not at all.

Let's get to the interview and hear more of what he has to say.

Very good.

Hello and welcome back to EPR. Today we're joined by Wasseem Emam, founder and head of research for Ethical Seafood Research, a nonprofit working to improve the welfare of aquatic animals across the food system of the global South. Welcome.

Hi, thank you for having me. It's great to be here.

Glad to have you. Let's start at the beginning of your career. When did you become interested in conservation and what made you want to study fish?

Yeah, so, I actually had a quite an interesting path into the work that I do now, that origin story, I guess, as they call it. During my undergraduate degree in Toronto in Canada, I was doing an environmental science major and as part of the degree, we had to do work placements. And then for my third work placement, I did one with the Ministry of Environment in the province of Ontario. So, I was, um, the title was biom monitoring technician. I was in the middle of a, this, the sport fish contaminant monitoring team, and I was assisting one of the senior scientists in collecting samples of fish and analyzing them in the lab to determine the safe levels, well, the levels of contaminants in the fish collected in different places in the province in water bodies and and then using that information to inform the guide. On how the safe levels to eat of sport fish as they call it. So there were two parts. There was field work and there was lab work. And I mean, the lab work was, yeah, not very interesting, but the field work was the first, the first time in my life actually working like in the field on boats with all those like cool gear. I mean, I come, I come from Egypt originally and you know, like it's pretty dry place. So, uh, and we just don't have this kind of like outdoorsy. Maybe not things are changing now, but like when I was growing up, we didn't really have this sort of outdoorsy culture. So this idea of people actually embracing the outdoors and then really like sort of when everyone was into like fishing or hunting or they all had cottages, so I was really leaning into that. But yeah, I just loved the idea of working on boats, you know, sampling fish and sort of being close to animals in that way. So that that's kind of what got me into it and then from there, yeah.

So I mean like your first experience on it, was it, it wasn't like your first time on a boat, was that when you were boat.

No, not a boat, but like first time on a like a scientific type of work, right? So uh like, you know, like obviously there are things that now seem basic but like electrofishing, I was like wow, this is so cool, like, you know, the boat, the boat is emitting like current and we are using these like real long rods to catch these fish and of course, like I say. I didn't grow up angling or fishing, so even that was like, oh wow, we can actually get things out of the water in this way. So that was a very cool, very cool.

So I mean, gosh, that's kind of wild and like was like there a result of that research in the beginning that kind of led you to founding ethical seafood Research?

Yeah, so I guess from there I just really liked the aquatic realm and you know, I I started realizing how, OK, well, the story that I always tell is that. My supervisor, who's obviously, you know, science was a much more experienced senior researcher, we would go out with these like large se nets and we'd catch. Hundreds if not thousands of small fish, and we only needed like a sample of 30 and we would have all the, all these fish like struggling in the net and while he was like carefully, meticulously like cold blooded if you want, like trying to pick like uh for a pun I mean, but if he to like pick these the sample he wanted, all I was thinking was like, I wanna put these fish back, so I started putting them back and, and him and I would often get into like these big arguments and he would say, oh, you know, like you're lousy. You know, you don't know what you're like, you do your job and stuff and, and I realized I kind of wasn't cut out for that part because I was more thinking about the unnecessary suffering. And then from there, that kind of informed my choice of master's degree and then a PhD in fish welfare, which was a very new field for me at the time. Yeah, of course, in an aquaculture context, so a bit different to like sampling in the wild. Um, and I realized there's a huge communities out there of people who They're starting to wake up to the reality of, you know, the fact that fish are sentient, that we are, we have a responsibility to treat them in a better way, especially ones that are under our care, like in farms and so on. And here I am, yes, and then someone gave me some money to start a charity and say, oh, why don't you like start your own thing and then, well, it was started off in Kenya, but then Egypt became like the next logical place because obviously I have roots from there and it's a very big fish farming country, so. Yeah, this was all like that, yeah, like how do you, um, you started in, you know, Kenya, you have, you have projects in Egypt, Tanzania, Nigeria. What are the projects that you work on and, and like you have expanded, which is great, but like, yeah, what were the challenges to get to where you are now?

The challenges, wow, so many. I mean, I guess that large seed grant as it was, was purely because of the stock markets rebounding in the wake of COVID and, you know, suddenly all these philanthropists suddenly like found themselves with more flush with cash than, than they expected to be and I was encouraged to like, you know, be ambitious when I put in this very basic grant and it came back. Like even more than what I asked for. OK, now I have to go away and do it and do exactly. So I think that fooled me or like kind of lulled into like a false sense of security that, oh, yeah, it's easy. But then after that, you know, the fundraising aspect is, you know, you start to hit the wall, like I guess in a startup, they call it maybe the value of death in terms of like, not being able to raise funds for business, but in a nonprofit. You quickly realize that actually your work is quite niche and that fundraising is a whole skill and it can be very time consuming and I went from the research that I loved to suddenly I'm like sucking up to all these donors to kind of get like uh $20 a month from them and stuff, you know. So, that was a big learning curve for sure. And of course, then you start to realize that as a scientist, I guess I always could justify. My work that understood how it improved things on the ground, but there was a lot of very heated emotions in the work that you do. So, you know, a lot of the vegans and I don't want to use the word extreme, but yeah, let's say the more extreme side of animal activism, you know, they don't want to see any animal farming, they don't want to see any animals used. So, like, obviously, some of our supporters and some of our larger movement. But trying to reconcile that reality with the reality of, you know, people on the ground, especially like, like I say, we work, and like you said, we work in parts of the world where, you know, fish have been a resource for a long time and uh, you know, we, we can't bring the same mentality to those communities. So trying to keep everyone happy and also feeling like your work does make sense and you're always justifying it to yourself. OK, here's an example to me bring it home, but, so I chose. The word seafood, ethical seafood research, you know, it makes sense to me, you know, OK, ethical, yeah, there's an animal welfare component, but also just like, just because something's sustainable doesn't mean it's ethical and that's kind of how I chose that. But then the word sea, and of course research, I don't need to like talk about that, but the word seafood, you can't imagine the amount of like stick until now that we get on social media and stuff from, like I say, you know, vegans and other anti-animal exit. who just, you know, but they say, oh, you objectify animals, the word seafood is just a sort of furthering that narrative that they're against. So I feel like a lot of our work is justifying our existence, which is hard.

Oh yeah, I mean, yeah, it's like yeah, I guess what they're saying is like you're calling it food and it doesn't need to be that, and that's very interesting. That is a complicated problem. So, well, what kind of projects do you have? Like what are you doing? How do you do? ethical.

So when I first started the project, well, we called it tilapia welfare Egypt because the species that we work with the most is tilapia, I guess in the US it's still fairly well known. In Europe, no one knows what tilapia is, mostly we don't eat it. It doesn't grow here or it doesn't grow, but like it doesn't survive in the wild as much and obviously it's invasive in America, but um it just doesn't. Yeah, exactly. So tilapia welfare. Egypt was a project that we started in 2022, working with fish farmers to even begin like bringing up the topic of animal welfare. And even the word in Arabic was so hard for us to find. So when you use the literal translation, it comes across as like, you know, a luxurious state of being, which they're like, well, human, humans don't have that. So you alienate them right away. You're like, who's the, who's this? Like westernized guy coming to tell me about like why fish should get this like kind of high level of treatment. So we had to adapt that. So I'd say even a language, you know, it's like night and day where, where we're starting from compared to like global north where the conversation is, sorry. So I was just trying to kind of maybe explain further what I meant, what how big that divide or gap is between the realities on the ground and sometimes our donors and supporters and so on.

Oh wow. Yeah, it's very interesting and. I love the work though. People, I've been vegetarian for 25 years, and people will say, well, do you eat fish? That's, I don't know, it's a common question for some reason, but do you eat fish? And I'm like, no, they're adorable. Why would I eat fish? They have faces and then then they always go, oh, but what about the sunfish? I'm like, I'm not eating a sunfish, OK? But, but, um,

To be clear, Laura, I was like, I have, I don't take a position on this at all, right? So like anyone is free to do what they want as long as you're living in line with your values. There's, I don't think there is a right and wrong for. Like, uh, objectively, you know, unless you're harming other people and then it becomes like a, a legal issue, but whether you choose to do that or not is, I feel like another, I, I don't get into that debate, but I guess I was using the word vegan for people who becomes more a moral thing and there's some righteousness in there that like, we are right, you are wrong, and it becomes a bit. Descriptive and so I guess that's the part of the vegan movement that I was saying that we struggle with, just so your listeners don't think I'm like anti-vegan or anything, yeah.

Yeah, totally, and I, I'm, I agree with that as well, you know, I don't, if you eat fish, good for you, I don't, I don't mind, but for me, they're adorable, but it, it surprises me how many people have never even thought of a fish as being cute and having personality, um, so it's still, I think it's important work to consider that, you know. How are they treated when they are in a farm or whatever because, you know, they have feelings to you.

Yeah, I feel like since you mentioned like, you know, well, indirectly like sentience and fish suffering and the fish feel pain, that's actually like one of the questions that comes up the most in our work and like we, you know, grapple with a lot and I just today actually, I don't know if you know the Aquaculture Stewardship Council, ASC, yeah, so like a big certifier of seafood globally, at farm seafood. Sorry, and I did a podcast with them some weeks ago. Well, we didn't really have a title, but the title came out today, The Fish Feel Pain, and that turns out to be the angle they took. So I can definitely tell you that this is something I feel very strongly about because there's a lot of misconceptions out there, right? So there's this idea that goldfish have short memories, of course, that fish are basic. I think because they don't have vocal, we don't hear the sounds that they make when you take them out of the water, for example, like that's. Sorry I was telling you about my supervisor when we were in the field, me trying to put the fish back. If they were like screaming, I think he would have had a different reaction, right? And I hear that when you slaughter a pig, it makes like a very horrible squeal.

No, yeah, no, I actually got stuck in a truck stop overnight with a truck full of pigs nearby and it literally was a terrifying sounds. They weren't even being killed, scared. They were just scared and it was the most terrifying noises I've heard ever.

Yeah, it was really sad and terrifying at the same time. Um, yeah, but I've been seeing a lot, like, I don't know, this comes up to my, my feed because of my interest, but I see so many articles lately about animals and feelings and animal rights, and I feel like there is, there is a movement. You know, kind of going towards this, which you're part of.

When I first, when I first joined this movement that I'm part of now, I still feel like I'm on the fringes a bit, but one of the famous philosophers in this space, maybe you know Peter Singer, he's like, he, he was at Princeton for a long time and then he retired, I think a couple of years ago. So he used to always say to people, I guess his um like in his lectures, like he would put an image of dogs being shipped to slaughter, like in a farm. And if you just look at the reaction of everyone, they get angry, they don't like it, but like just how biased we are towards some animals. Here's an example where I live in Spain, they love horse meat. It's very, I don't know in the US you have horse meat, uh, is it on, oh no, no, no, right, OK, yeah, so they said that both of our faces are like, oh yeah, exactly. So how and like there's so many animals that we feel certain things towards, but others we don't, and. At some point you kind of have to ask yourself, is that conditioning or is it something bigger, but uh fish definitely are the ones like I can tell you from a fundraising perspective, it's really hard to get people to relate in the same way. It's like, you know, with uh companion animals like dogs and cats, they get so much funding because people love their cats and dogs. Much fewer people are inclined to feel that kind of sympathy with a um fish or another aquatic animal. Shrimp, by the way, are like now we know that they're sent. And so there's work being done to like bring in protection and give them better conditions and so on, but like we used to think of them as insects, kind of like they're almost like they're cockroaches. Even insects, by the way, there's people who like really feel strongly about insect welfare who I can guess on the whole like um yeah, don't worry, don't worry. So, so, so to answer, to answer your question, the way that our approach is, this is the sales pitch. This version is obviously research is in our name. That's a big part of what we do, but we take an applied approach. So we both research and implement solutions to improve the welfare or reduce the suffering depending on who I'm talking to. I'll flip that of aquatic animals in the food system, so that's wild capture, fisheries and aquaculture, but really mostly aquaculture, always applied and always with stakeholders on the ground that will implement the interventions that we come up with. For example, we have a program called Harvest Well, Harvest Well Egypt because that's where we're trying it out, which is basically trying to find better ways for fish to be killed at the end of the. Production cycle because right now they're just taken out of the water, they're put on dry ice and they just die over hours and sometimes even like a better part of a day if the weather's, if it's not too hot, they can actually last like, basically it's like a very agonizing death. So, we don't want to call it humane slaughter because most of the solutions that we work with are not actually humane. They're less cruel or more humane than the current status quo. The gold standard would be electrical stunning, which is just out of reach for the sector in its current form. Apart from research, we have now a policy strand as well, so we work with governments to bring in welfare standards, to bring in a strategy for improving animal welfare. It depends where the interest is and where they're starting from. A good example of this is in Zanzibar, which is a semi-autonomous group of islands off the coast of Tanzania. They invited us to help them develop their aquaculture strategy for the next 15 years, and we said, well, that's not really exactly our line of work, but we'll do it if. You in exchange for committing to high welfare principles, we can go to our funders and ask them if they would support that. And they said, yeah, no problem, you know, we can commit to, you know, being one of the leading sectors. And then when we actually started carrying out the stakeholder consultations and talking to people on the ground, we realized that, Actually, Zanzibar's already farming seaweed. They're doing a really good job of it. There's a lot more scale to do more of it and it's employing women and younger people. There's a whole like made in Zanzibar added value that they're leaning into and there was so much more they can do there. So our strategy ended up justifying why they should invest in seaweed and, you know, kind of not really get into fish farming because they're not doing it anyway, so why get into something if they're not doing it? And as you can imagine, obviously a lot of the animal people that I mentioned. That we work closely with. They were so excited about it's like, oh, you actually managed to build a case, like inherent case for why people should avoid an activity that harms sentient animals. So, that's some of the kind of policy work we do and of course, it's always educational work and training and capacity building for farmers, for veterinarians, for even school kids. We have an activity book on aquatic animals that we wrote a couple of years ago. Yeah, that was a very high level summary for you.

That's very fun. Awesome, it is fun. So, on top of doing all of this, you also are getting your PhD?

I'm almost finished, yes, it was a very long, because I started so many years ago and then like, you know, I went part time and then I start ESR and I just only needed really to add a tiny bit of data to make it stronger, but yeah, so now I'm in the final stretch. I'll just need to. Write another paper and I should be done, yeah.

Well, that's awesome. I think a lot of people listening, you know, they're making career choices and stuff, so what made you choose to get a PhD when you already had, you know, something working going?

So, I was working at the FAO, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, right after my master's. I, I got a nice consultancy in Rome at the headquarters, and I realized that I was too young to be doing the kind of work that I dreamed of doing before because I just didn't have experience. So like, if you go to the UN without having done work in a government or an industry or whatever, you're not really of much value because you don't have that much knowledge. It's much better to come in when you've. Built like 1020, 30 years, maybe you're not 30 because I guess you'll be like at the very end of your career unless you're a director. But um so I realized that I need to get more experience and I could see like the career path of, you know, master's PhD and then you go work in a place like that. And I happened to get funding from the Canadian government to do a PhD. It's like a, a scheme that the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council. So what they do is They give you money, not the university, not the professor that you work with, you, and you have a ability, yeah, exactly, you're free to go. It's, it's a very unique model because around the world, you'll find very few cases where that's possible. But because they believe in you, it's like merit-based, they tell you like feel free to choose anyone you work with, just get these forms signed and we'll give you the funding and so on. So, I actually had a free reign to choose, and that's part of the reason I think why it took me so long. Because I just kept, you know, oh, you know, I'll start something. I like I didn't, no one could like really tell me what to do that much because I was bringing my own money and my own work. So I was go and added a bolt onto their existing programs. So that's kind of why what pushed me to, well, I thought, well, someone clearly believes that I am good enough for a PhD, so why don't I go, why don't, why don't I go for it, right? Yeah, and the the UN environment also. That was a very long winded answer. Feel free to.

No, no, it's all good, um, and it actually does tee up what we want to ask you next because, you know, like Laura and I both love to travel. I think we both have the mentality that like seeing the world is the best way to really experience like all of humanity, right? You don't get it all just sitting in one place and you have some exciting travel coming up, you'll be in Greece in September presenting to the General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean. You're also organizing and co-chairing a session at the Aquaculture Africa conference in Tanzania, so. What's it like to be such a world traveler and share your experience, your work with a broad audience?

Yeah, you know, actually, Nic, this is gonna sound like the saddest answer ever, but like, I don't know how it's getting old or what, but like, when I, like, this used to be so exciting thinking of my life now, 1015 years ago, I was like, oh, that was a dream. But now that I'm living that, I'm just exhausted most of the time. Like I was in Ghana last week.

I know, I know, I know, I know that's so lame.

Like I was, oh no, it's not, it's not, it's true, it's honest, right? Yeah, fair.

Yeah, I was in Ghana last week and like, honestly, I couldn't wait to come back home and. Uh, everyone, like all the other guys, like the young guys especially, like they're so excited. They go like they factor in all these days to do trips, but like I go straight there, straight back, and, um, well, also I have like two young kids, right? So I feel like the guilt, the guilt factor of, but I actually wanted to tell you like, like an example that might maybe your listeners will appreciate this. So last year I went to the same conference, this year it was in Ghana, last year it was in Kenya, and they hosted it in a hotel right in front of Nairobi National Park and. Like, of course, everyone was so excited because they couldn't wait to finish the, like the day's program so they could go to the safari. We were there for like a week almost and I didn't go, like I didn't leave the hotel once, you know, I saw a giraffe, giraffe at some point from the window. 10 years ago, that would have been unfathomable, you know, I was trying to collect.

I know. Yeah, I actually had the same exact experience in Hawaii once where I, Hawaii.

Oh my gosh, how was it?

I was like, I don't know. I couldn't tell you, and I was, I was in meetings the whole time and had to get back right after. And so it was kind of, so I'm not weird. No, no, no, that's very much right in line with me sometimes and it's tough. I totally feel you.

Fair enough. Yeah.

No, but you are lucky to have been so many places to get to this point. I, I imagine, you know, like, it starts, it starts with the excitement and everything. And then I think you get to the, well, I've been here, done that before, so.

Yeah, that's true. That's true, that's true. I mean, I guess, so now I get excited, like, for example, this, the Greece example you gave. It's not the Greece part, but it's the fact that, OK, I'll tell you a story that, like for me has been one of the pinnacles so far of my career to date. Last year, the AVMA or AMA, I actually don't know if anyone calls them AMA, the American Veterinary Medicine Association. invited me to judge the tilapia welfare life scenario as part of their annual animal welfare assessment contest for us, so it's like for veterinarians that are like either studying or want to like kind of continue learning, so they come to this really nice weekend that's organized in different universities and last year I was in Texas A&M. So the people who organize it, they like basically invent a scenario of the facility looks like this and there's a situation, what would you do and how would you like, what would you do to improve animal welfare or assess it in that context. And you kind of judge and score people. Sorry, that was a very long winded explanation, but like, it doesn't sound that big a deal, but like they contacted me based on some paper that I wrote to say like, hey, you're an expert in your feet on this tilapia welfare thing. Can you come out and judge? And I just felt like, oh cool, actually, you know, I am doing something meaningful here. Like most people laugh at me like, oh yeah, this guy cares about fish. I like, you know, get out of here. But that was a moment where I thought, yeah, you know, my life makes sense. So that wasn't a particularly exciting, it was College Station, I think it's called in Texas. Like, I mean, it's a nice place, but like I wasn't excited about the place, but I was excited about what it meant to be selected there. And the Greece is exactly the same, you know, that'll be with guys who are much older than me, by the way, so like, um, and that also makes me feel like, um, you're, yeah, you're doing good things.

Yeah. Yeah, that's awesome. I mean, I feel that too when I get invited to a career coach and stuff somewhere, I'm like, awesome, I like when I get the invite and I don't have to ask to be there.

That's awesome, yeah, cause you guys are both industry, like, you have industry jobs, right?

Uh, yeah, yeah, I am for sure.

Yeah, I'm a little more loosey goosey on that, but, um, but yeah, we're both, we're both still in it.

What advice do you have for young professionals or anyone who may be interested in these types of causes? And I would say I would have that go with not only do they want to get into this type of work, but if they want to get into something that is new. You know, you're kind of doing something that is counter to most people's beliefs, and, but it's still a worthy cause. How do you get into that and then how do you keep the mindset to keep going?

Yeah, I suppose I was just telling, I'm sorry, oversharing, but my therapist today I was actually telling him that like, I impressed myself because of like, my tenacity to not give up even when like, you hit low points and you're like, oh yeah, nothing, nothing's going well for me. In that case, there were some funders that pulled out of our work in the last couple of years, big funders that we were sort of, all of our work was gearing up to, we were banking on that working out. And when it didn't work out, you know, it was a big blow to us and of course my team that I, I kind of had hired and so on. So, I guess continue to believe in the work you're doing and that try to have a a longer look further ahead and trust your gut instinct. And in my case, that's definitely been uh a big factor in continuing to keep going even when the going gets tough. And to think outside the box as well, yeah, that's helped me a lot.

Yeah, yeah, I think it's tough when like the fish can't actually give you a thank you themselves, but somewhere along the line, the universe and the fish world will be thanking you, and um we're at a segment on our show called #tag Field notes. It's where we talk to our guests about their memorable moments in the field doing the work and ask for funny, scary, awkward, or otherwise just memorable moments. And share them with us at info@environmentalprofessionalsradio.com or from the website, there's a form there, and you have a story about the tilapia set up in Egypt, but you're welcome to share anything else that comes to mind.

So yeah, that story was actually quite interesting. So that was the first year of my PhD. I was in the field in Egypt and my supervisor said to me, like, go out and figure out how to improve the welfare of tilapia, but I was part of a larger project. Actually, it's it's kind of a cool project, so maybe I'll just explain the scientific aspect. In the same way, it's something called behavioral fever in fish and in most like ectotherms, so like reptiles, amphibians, so in the same way that mammals, when they're sick, their body raises the temperature of fever in order to like fight off the infection that is taking place. What fish and other ectotherms or cold-blooded animals are known to do is that they'll seek warmer water or a warmer environment. So that's like behaviorally increasing your, Your body temperature and has been shown to not fight off disease completely, but it can help in recovery and healing. So, the idea that my supervisors uh in Scotland had was, can we use the same behavioral fever concept in an aquaculture context? Like imagine instead of using antibiotics or whatever medicines, the fish just have access to a thermal gradient and they can move to a warmer part of the. and naturally feel better. So that was our idea, of course, in reality, it's not easy to apply. So the story that I have is that our whole setup was counting on the fact that we were going to have these greenhouses above a part of the pond in Egypt, and that obviously we always assumed that greenhouses heat water below for some reason, well, not some reason. Now I understand why because you. To build it perfectly so that there's no air coming in, yeah, exactly. So actually, the greenhouse was the coolest part, not the war in all of the ones.

Yeah, exactly, because the heat dissipates very fast if you don't build it and I guess maybe you know more than me, but like, exactly, yeah, so, so actually we had the reverse effect and luckily it wasn't completely wasted because the greenhouses also. It's shelter and shading and from a welfare perspective, we now know that tilapia really like, they feel safer when they have refuge. Uh, it's a form of what we call environmental enrichment. So it did kind of give us some, yeah, exactly. So it was a data set that we could use, but not for that. Like the whole study and the whole premise of this behavioral fever, we never managed to answer whether, you know, it could work in the aquaculture context. So that's. The story that I didn't mention.

So not, so not all was lost. That's good.

No, yeah, not, not a terrible ending, at least, right?

Yeah, right.

I guess you must get some funny ones. Sorry, go ahead, Nic.

No, no, no, that's great, and it's like something, like I said, like we joke on the show, we learn something new every day, we do it, and I never would have thought that that would be a thing, and that is very cool. That's a very cool experience that you had. That's, that's great.

It was, yeah.

And yeah, and I hate, I hate to say it, but we are already running out of time. So before we let you go, is there anything else you'd like to say?

So I suppose. And, you know, I always try to adjust the message depending on the listeners or the viewers or whoever it isn't in the question, but normally there's a question that we have about, you know, how do you choose, like, like you said, Laura, about like, uh, do you eat fish, that question you get. So, if you're, you know, I guess my not ask, but what I would leave people with is like, Whether you choose to eat seafood or not, just inform yourself where it's coming from, because most people, they know so little about, like, even when you start talking about fish farming, they don't have any idea of what that looks like, where the, you know, that most fish farm is actually in inland freshwater ponds and not uh these marine cages that they imagine, and then there's like if you get into, the more you get into it, the more you realize. Actually, you don't know very much about the conditions that they are kept in, so I would just say inform yourself and, you know, if you can choose certified, obviously that's, there's problems there, but it's still better than uncertified and um just keep asking questions.

Yeah, that's perfect. And last but not least, if people do want to reach out to you, what's the best way for them to do that?

We're fairly active on LinkedIn, so both my. Personal account, uh, Wasseem Emam. Uh there's not too many people with my exact, exact spelling of my name, but ethical seafood research is easily found on LinkedIn and of course our website, we usually respond to any inquiries there and my email is Wasseem, but that's W A S S E E M at ethical seafood Research.org.

Uh thank you, Wasseem so much for being here. Uh, it was a great interview. Thank you for your time.

Thank you very much. It was a pleasure always.

That's our show. Thank you, Wasseem for joining us today. Please be sure to check us out each and every Friday. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review. See you, everybody.