4 ms·

This might be the answer to our "depleted ocean fish stock" problem. Feed the bottom of the food chain and we'll have plenty of fish in 5 years.

• hga 16y ago
  With the possible exception of damaged ocean bottoms, I'm not aware of any "depleted ocean fish stock" problem that's a loss of total biomass. What we've seen with e.g. the cod off of New England is the suppression of an apex predictor to the point where many suspect it has been replaced by new apex predators that have prevented its revival to commercially significant numbers. Bad news if you love the taste of cod (as I do, I showed up in the Boston area in its waning days) but not quite the same thing. That said, iron is said to be the limiting micro-nutrient in the oceans (mostly in the context of CO2 geo-engineering) so adding that to an area would be a first step to achieving greater biomass. But it still wouldn't bring back the cod :-(.
  • pyre 16y ago
    To some extent, I find it kind of disheartening that the only reason that you care about over-fishing and the possible extinction of species is how it affects your dinner plate... (i.e. If you didn't like the taste of cod, then you wouldn't care about it at all.)
    • hga 16y ago
      Errr ... I'm not sure where you came to that conclusion from what I said. I follow the cod situation because of "how it affects [my] dinner plate" and because I had a near front row seat to the whole mess for a dozen years, I don't follow the blue-fin? tuna one closely because I don't care all that much about them. And, yeah, I was raised by a fisher and very serious hunter and I often view animals through the lens of their ending up on my dinner plate. None of that has anything to do with how much I might care about "possible extinction", which is something I'm mostly resigned to (e.g. see the passenger pigeon), except ... as far as I know, we're not talking about that with former apex predators. It 's just that their stocks are no longer commercially viable, the theory here being that they are now prey. That might result in them going extinct, but I don't think that's the default assumption. I bet if you wanted to set up a cod fish farm it wouldn't be too difficult to get wild-type breeding stock to start with. No one's done that (as far as I know) since there are other areas with cod and similar fish that haven't seen a population collapse.
• hugh3 16y ago
  Unfortunately crude oil at $70 a barrel is probably expensive as fish food.
  • Groxx 16y ago
    How much is it if you take away the transportation and refining systems, though? All that goes into the cost.
    • hugh3 16y ago
      Well crude oil is by definition unrefined, but it's safe to assume that most of it is the raw cost of the product since it was still profitable to sell crude oil at $10 a barrel a few years ago when supply and demand were a bit more out of wack.
      • hga 16y ago
        Also note that this oil was light sweet (low sulfur) crude, something that is getting more and more rare. You wouldn't expect the same results from e.g. Venezuela's very heavy sour crude (to take a local and large example).