6 ms·
It's really frustrating how hard it is to properly manage/use a resource like the ocean. We're not running out of chicken, but we are running out of fish.
by NegativeLatency 9y ago
It's really frustrating how hard it is to properly manage/use a resource like the ocean.
We're not running out of chicken, but we are running out of fish.
- sandworm101 9y agoBecause we are feeding the fish to the chickens. We provide the calories for the chicken to grow, but we harvest fish without such inputs. If we were harvesting wild chickens, or at least chickens that caught their own food in the wild, we would certainly wipe them out in a matter of days if not hours.
- HillaryBriss 9y agowe're also feeding fish meal (from the ocean) to farmed salmon in aquaculture operations i think it was Cousteau who said that farming carnivorous fish like salmon was just a terrible idea. it requires a really high ratio of fish meal protein to salmon protein, something like 6 to 1. we'd be better off farming more fish that behave like Tilapia. they can eat their own excrement.
- jacobush 9y agoI think you have to work on that pitch a little. Eats its own shit?
- kazagistar 9y agoWhatever, Tilapia is tasty and ecological.
- jacobush 9y agoYes, I like Tilapia too. But the pitch may need tuning nevertheless. :)
- Tharkun 9y agoDo you eat rabbit? Rabbits eat their own shit.
- jessaustin 9y agoI've lived on farms with dogs, cats, pigs, goats, horses, chickens, etc. The only farm animals I haven't seen eat their own shit are cattle, but frankly it wouldn't shock me to make that discovery someday.
- thatsabrill 9y agoyou've got to be shittin me. I suppose you assume the animals were in distress from captivity.
- jessaustin 9y agoCertainly not. I've lived on farms most of my life, and I have no moral objections to farm animals, their lot in life, or their occasional coprophagy impulse. It really isn't that weird to eat shit. Has anyone alive really not seen a dog do it? Did you really create a new account to make that comment? What's the motivation there?
- pvaldes 9y agoBecause they need to recyclate some specific kind of valuable vitamin created by bacteria from rabbit stomach, I think, so they need to pass two times by the gut the same material. In any case what rabbits ruminate does not apply to Tilapia, is a different kind of animal. If Tilapia arent feeded, they will eat algae and smaller Tilapia. Small tilapia fry can survive eating microbes and algae that grow in organic residues for a while, but this is a different question. Giving cattle the minimum to just survive is not the same as farming cattle.
- Joakal 9y agoIn Australia where Basa fillets can go as cheap as $5/kg in a supermarket (Chicken breasts are can be as cheap as $9/kg for reference), some people don't buy Basa fillets. Why? The reputation of basa is that it's farmed poorly in Vietnam where people shit in the same farm that grow fish. Note: Basa is a type of catfish that can grow well despite dirty water.
- pvaldes 9y agoI understand the logic of this phrase, but I don't see Cousteau eating a lot of herbivorous fish in his films. When they fish and cook fishes in the Calipso, are often from carnivorous species. Because carnivorous fish are delicious, and herbivorous fish often just so-so. There is not reason to put your money in a product that nobody will buy. On the other hand, Tilapia needs proteins. Few animals can trive eating just its own discarding products, void for definition of anything that would merit to be recicled by the fish metabolism. If their fish (or cattle, or poultry) is so hungry that start to eat their own excrement, they are just making a very poor product, and scamming their customers.
- cultofmetatron 9y agowhy not grow crickets for salmon feed?
- HillaryBriss 9y agoi personally would not object to that. i guess farms are not set up to do that (yet). i've heard that wild sockeye salmon eat a lot of insects and therefore wind up with lower levels of mercury than, say, tuna. farmed salmons is not sockeye.
- Iv 9y agoFish farms are a thing too (and an ecological problem)
- rbobby 9y agoPassenger pigeons were hunted to extinction as food for humans. Last one died in 1914. Hunting supposedly intensified sometime in the 1800's... so probably significantly less than 100 years to hunt a bird species to extinction.
- duncan_bayne 9y agoTragedy of the commons. If people owned areas of the ocean in the way they own areas of land for farming, this would be less of an issue.
- gumby 9y agoLook how Victor Harbour in South Australia managed its fishing allocations for a great example of how to pull this kind of thing off. But it’s not easy.
- Sangermaine 9y agoIt's not quite as easy with the ocean. Land doesn't tend to flow around freely.
- duncan_bayne 9y agoAnd the ocean is _deep_, too, and it's much easier to pollute your neighbours. But the basic principle is the same: private property rights can help mitigate these problems.
- Retric 9y agoTell that to the 1322+ Superfund sites in the US costing ~1 billion per year. The optimum strategy for small land ownership is often maximum exploitation. In the case of the ocean fishing people would fish as much as possible, and just wait for more fish to wonder back.
- duncan_bayne 9y agoYeah that's because your bankruptcy laws are broken AFAICT - it's too easy to hold insufficient funds for post operational clean-up, then transfer assets elsewhere and declare bankruptcy. That is, private owners in this case are able to socialise the cost of their operation, which is no more private ownership than when the profits are socialised.
- wavefunction 9y ago
- belorn 9y agoWe are running out of the very small selection of species of fish that we want to buy. The wast majority of fish belong to those that we don't want to buy, which either get thrown away or sold for almost nothing in order to be smashed into animal feed. To say that we are running out of fish (generally) is problematic since there is overpopulation problems in lakes near where I live. The problem is that the fish isn't the kind that people want to buy, so fishermen goes where the money is.
- Yizahi 9y agoActually in long term we are running out of all fish due to acidification of the oceans. But that will happen much further in the future.
- sebleon 9y agoJellyfish should be fine
- mrgreenfur 9y agoAnd sea turtles!
- pvaldes 9y agoFish discarded are dead also.