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Hardiness: Atlantic salmon show hardiness when juveniles, thanks to their early stages of life in a rich egg sac. Meanwhile, Sea bass are more vulnerable and need careful rearing to ensure they get necessary nutrients.
Endowed with in-born liking for men: Neither salmon nor Sea bass are notably in-born with this. This part of Galton’s criteria is not readily viable in regards to aquacultures. As far as fish goes, the closest translation to a liking for men seems to be their tolerance of being in farms.
Comfort-loving: Salmon could be considered comfort-loving. Farmed salmon thrived when placed in a predator-free, amply food supplied environment. However, Sea Bass are not. As Greenberg notes “… are generally not [comfort-loving]… and hate containment…’.
Able to breed freely: I couldn’t find anything on whether salmon were difficult to breed. When salmon farming began, breeding itself didn’t appear to be a problem. There was more of a focus on gaining preferred/desired characteristics, which seems to indicate breeding the fish weren’t difficult. Worthwhile, noting in breeding is the high visibility of salmon eggs, making them easier to manage.
On the other hand, Sea Bass do not breed freely. Not only are their eggs difficult to see, bass require hyper salinity to spawn and don’t release all their eggs at once (rather over a period of time). A hormone had to be created to hinder the enzyme behind bass asynchronous spawning behavior and a special sphere to gradually release the hormone.
Needful of only a minimal amount of tending: Salmon appear to be relatively lower-maintenance fish. As mentioned in comfort-loving, salmon were successfully brought up in a predator-free, food supplied environment. Meanwhile, Sea Bass require more care. They require two different types of food as growing juveniles (first rotifer, then artemia). They also will not survive unless their containment is properly cleaned during their fragile early stages (i.e. removing oil film from top of water to enable fish to get first bubble of air), which requires monitoring development to know when this is necessary. Looking at the last previous criteria also offers a handful of reasons why Sea Bass are not minimal effort: difficult to breed, extremely fragile when hatched, and generally do poorly in captivity.
Ultimately, I don’t think Sea Bass pass Galton’s criteria to test for good candidates in aquaculture. Each step towards farming presented one issue after another. As far as aquaculture goes, Sea Bass appear to be favored foremost because of their rich, ingrained history with people, rather than our ability to farm them.
I agree with you that aquaculture seems to have slightly different standards for domestication than Galton’s criteria. Like you said, no fish is really born with an inborn liking to men. I do agree that salmon are low maintenance compared to bass, but really all fish are fairly sensitive and high maintenance animals. For example, compare to any of our domesticated land animals, like chickens or cattle. For the most part, you can house them just about anywhere that is fairly clean and dry, and has food and water. Salmon however, even being pretty well adapted to different water conditions, still require a fresh flow of water, a pretty specific environment that you either have to build in or recreate yourself with pumps. An algae bloom from still water could kill and suffocate all of your fish, whereas huge clouds of CO2 suffocating your pigs and goats are fair less common. Just comparing to the more “basic” livestock, fish have a lot more than can go wrong, that I think makes them much more difficult to raise.
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