Most Farmed Aquatic Species 2024

What this chart shows. The fifteen individual species that aquaculture produced in the greatest quantity worldwide during 2024, from seaweeds through carps to shrimp. Each bar is the global harvest of that one species, in tonnes of live weight for animals and wet weight for algae.

How the data is collected. Countries report their farmed harvest species by species, and FAO arranges the returns under roughly 4,000 commercial species items grouped into the fifty groups and nine divisions of its International Standard Statistical Classification of Aquatic Animals and Plants. Scientific names follow the ASFIS list that FAO maintains for fishery statistics.

Background. The classification sorts species by taxonomy, ecology and economic use rather than by market category, which is why farmed algae, freshwater fish and marine shellfish appear on one list. FAO publishes the same species detail for capture fisheries, so the two sides of the sector can be compared item by item.

Limits. Catch-all categories whose names end in NEI, meaning not elsewhere included, have been left out because each of them bundles several species together; the largest one excluded here is cupped oysters, at 7,292,710 tonnes. A species raised in many countries is shown as a single world figure, and hybrids are recorded under the item the reporting country chose.