7 ms·

Red Snapper Filet Might Have Been Caught by Drug Runners

43 points by Amorymeltzer 5y ago

sweetheart 5y ago
So much of the article explains how US seas are being illegally fished by Mexican lancheros because Mexican waters have already been so overfished. The article also mentions some of the pretty terrible effects of this overfishing that we are starting to see in the Gulf, like sharks being caught in nets, which really throws the food chain out of whack (after all, nets catch everything, not just the snapper). I wonder when people will start to realize that these terrible things happen, and will get worse, as long as people choose to eat fish. There is nothing in fish that the human body requires (or can’t get elsewhere), so we do it only because we like the taste. We are willing to let ecosystems collapse, drug cartels profit, and issues with the ocean continue to worsen because we want to taste fish. It’s hard to argue that’s a reasonable exchange.
- pibechorro 5y ago
  Fish is one of the healthiest food you can eat, take your diet agenda elsewhere. The problem here is our role in the ecosystem, which is extractive and not in harmony. The main culprit is land locked people eating far away foods, its not sustainable. Everything should be optimized for local, in season consumption. Imported food aught to be a treat, not a staple.
  - hellbannedguy 5y ago
    Being a vegetarian is healthy too. We can't have everything. There's just too many people on this wounded planet. I would love to eat fish. I can't because of cost, and too many people love to eat them. We all can't have everything we want.
  - alisonkisk 5y ago
    This makes no sense. If landlocked people moved to the coast, that would solve your "local" problem but not fix overfishing at all. And if fish is so important to eat, landlocked people mustn't be deprived of it. You are conflating transportation costs with nutrition and getting a meaningless argument. Take your local agenda elsewhere.
  - BrianOnHN 5y ago
    This comment is spot on. Furthermore, this year alone, I've seen megatons of dead fish wash up within a week because of a single phosphorus(fertilizer) dump into the gulf. So to reiterate, eating fish isn't the problem. The current human role in our ecosystem, is.
  - msh 5y ago
    Many places in the world you can only produce food locally in a limited season, so you have to store or import. I don't think import is naturally much worse than storage.
  - heliodor 5y ago
    By the same logic, you should not be using Saudi Arabia's oil. Some places have more of something than they need for their own consumption. Trade makes sense.
    - Fnoord 5y ago
      We are, for now, dependant on fossil fuels (including from nefarious regimes). I like fish, practically all except coalfish/pollock/seelachs (which does have a nice advantage: cheap and widely available). Fish is supposedly a good sourcevon omega 3 fatty acids, vitamin D, and vitamin B13. Which are all 3 difficult to come by if you largely follow a vegan diet otherwise. Yes I have the choice of eating things like cowmilk, chicken eggs, and cheese, but I generally don't like them. For example, I only molten cheese and non-boiled eggs. So I end up regularly eating some Captain Iglo/Birdseye fish sticks which are cheap and mask the taste and structure of coalfish/pollock/seelachs. One time in a German restaurant we got excited. Seelachs, that's salmon, right? Wrong, salmon is lachs, seelachs is coalfish/pollock. Such disappointment while I see people getting served, price was too good to be true (it was a large group deal though). I ended up eating one bite. See, not many brands cover up the taste well. In this case, no seasoning whatsoever was used. The problem is, back 100 days ago, imported foods were a luxury. You'd eat local unless you were rich (most people were not). But we don't do that because those who pollute get away with it; they don't pay a fair share to destimulate the behaviour enough, and the bioindustry is very efficient and caused an availability of meat for the pleb folk. If we go on in this pace, major cities like Amsterdam are unlikely to exist in 2100. But voters don't seem to care, so the future of my children is likely not near the city they were born, they can vusit it by boat or drone or Maps by then, reading on Wikipedia what once and how adults failed. All because we were too greedy and unwilling to solve it on a macro level.
      - FDSGSG 5y ago
        >Wrong, salmon is lachs, seelachs is coalfish/pollock This is very much a deliberate (and successful) scam by the Germans, and not something that came about naturally. Seelachs is a trade name they came up with because "Kohler" didn't sound good enough. https://rp-online.de/leben/gesundheit/ernaehrung/seelachs-der-erfundene-fisch_aid-15780139 https://rp-online.de/leben/gesundheit/ernaehrung/seelachs-de...
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    > The main culprit is land locked people eating far away foods, its not sustainable. > Everything should be optimized for local, in season consumption. Imported food aught to be a treat, not a staple. It's not like we don't know how this turns out. You're advocating for pretty severe malnutrition in a lot of landlocked populations.
  - merrywhether 5y ago
    You’re basically saying that just because we haven’t been great at general fishery management yet doesn’t mean we won’t get it right next time. But the problem here is that fisheries are literally the textbook example of the tragedy of the commons and there will always be someone looking to capture the benefits while externalizing the costs. I’m not disagreeing with you that unsustainable eating is the root of this (and many other) problem but the only successful solutions has been extremely strong semi-militaristic (eg Coast Guard with teeth) enforcement of fishing quotas that are quite unpopular for all involved: fishers who lose jobs, eaters who lose access to a favorite taste, etc. No one likes taking their vitamins as it were.
  - sweetheart 5y ago
    There is remarkably little environmental impact when it comes to shipping food around the world. Also, you say the problem is our extractive practices when it comes to nature. We only extract because people demand it. We ought to stop demanding it.
1cvmask 5y ago
The curious case of a country that sends its troops all over the world to “protect” the borders of other countries but strangely ignores its own border. Then again the government (through the CIA) was involved in drug running. So you want an unfortified border then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Alliance_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Alliance_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Webb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Webb
- llamataboot 5y ago
  I would hardly call the US border "ignored"
  - redis_mlc 5y ago
    The US southern border is currently not enforced, thanks to Biden's Open Border policy. It's expected 2 million illegal migrants will walk across the Mexican border into the US in 2021.
    - toss1 5y ago
      riiight... that's why there's a scandal about border patrol on horseback rounding up migrants to be sent back to their home country, and significant encampments of people trying (i.e., failing) to get across; this is not merely open borders and walking across as you falsely imply. Stop posting propaganda
  - frankharv 5y ago
    Your right about that. While the Feds have adjudicated their duties the state of Texas has had to step up and bring in state resources. Charging people with a misdemeanor trespassing charges as a last resort when the Border Patrol is hamstrung by politics. Why not build that wall? Just ask Poland about the value of a wall. Europe is finally realizing there is orderly migration on one hand and chaos by bandits on the other. Really sad situation. Poor people deserve better. To spend their life savings on human smuggling is a pity.
EdwardDiego 5y ago
Are the snapper perhaps a fair exchange for the US caused dramatic impacts on the health of the Colorado delta, and the resulting massive impact on the Kwapa, a people whose entire identity was based on the Colorado River? Silly question, but I find the article's tone of polite outrage a bit hypocritical. Bonus points for the DRUGGGS outrage angle. Especially when Texas used to be the province of Tejas, until the Anglos (who'd been invited) rebelled when Mexico tried to prevent illegal migration from the US, and banned slavery. Maybe Texas is a fair trade for snapper?
- andrew_ 5y ago
  Try to ignore the political aspects of this for a moment. The entire biome of the Gulf is at stake here when a single species is threatened. The Gulf might seem like it's a huge body of water on paper (and I mean, it is) but it's a rather small salt water ecosystem by comparison. The smaller the ecosystem, the bigger the impact of a disruption. NOAA, for all of their faults and some questionable season closures, have helped successfully bring back several species from near extinction and in doing so helped keep the entire Gulf fishery alive. It's bigger than petty politics. I've been fishing for snapper for the last 8 years in the Gulf off of the Florida coast, where most of the prized species are heavily regulated (and heavily fined for breaking regs). The Gulf has seen several rounds of disruption and keeps bouncing back. Keeping the Gulf healthy is not only the right thing to do from an environmental view, but also for what it provides to the people who live in states and countries surrounding it.
  - cheese_van 5y ago
    I fished snapper all my life in the Gulf as well thinking it was unique to the Gulf. I was delighted to find red snapper in Indonesia during a visit there. The genus Lutjanus is a fairly well distributed in the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Ocean and they are all tasty. The beachside Indonesian practice is to cook them in smoke houses with coconut husks as fuel. Anyway, snapper is everywhere, and everywhere over-fished.
  - splitstud 5y ago
    I've fished the gulf for 50 years. The gulf is better stocked with fish now than in my youth. The thanks for this goes to the GCCA and state regs.
echopurity 5y ago
Prohibition and carnism destroy the ocean along with countless lives? No surprise.
stevespang 5y ago
At the moment captains are reporting the snapper population offshore in Texas have never been better, in fact, this month the Federal season was reopened a bit for snapper. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has started using Texas National Guard and DPS troops to arrest and imprison illegals crossing the Texas land border - - -over 7,000 so far. Why not start arresting any illegal fishermen caught in Texas waters and auctioning off their boats far inland to US citizens to help pay for it ? Texas State waters go out 9 miles from the coast, and I have no problem with dragging any found out farther into Texas waters to arrest them. Time to put the cartels on notice . . .

43 points by Amorymeltzer 5y ago

So much of the article explains how US seas are being illegally fished by Mexican lancheros because Mexican waters have already been so overfished. The article also mentions some of the pretty terrible effects of this overfishing that we are starting to see in the Gulf, like sharks being caught in nets, which really throws the food chain out of whack (after all, nets catch everything, not just the snapper). I wonder when people will start to realize that these terrible things happen, and will get worse, as long as people choose to eat fish. There is nothing in fish that the human body requires (or can’t get elsewhere), so we do it only because we like the taste. We are willing to let ecosystems collapse, drug cartels profit, and issues with the ocean continue to worsen because we want to taste fish. It’s hard to argue that’s a reasonable exchange.

pibechorro 5y ago
Fish is one of the healthiest food you can eat, take your diet agenda elsewhere. The problem here is our role in the ecosystem, which is extractive and not in harmony. The main culprit is land locked people eating far away foods, its not sustainable. Everything should be optimized for local, in season consumption. Imported food aught to be a treat, not a staple.
- hellbannedguy 5y ago
  Being a vegetarian is healthy too. We can't have everything. There's just too many people on this wounded planet. I would love to eat fish. I can't because of cost, and too many people love to eat them. We all can't have everything we want.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  This makes no sense. If landlocked people moved to the coast, that would solve your "local" problem but not fix overfishing at all. And if fish is so important to eat, landlocked people mustn't be deprived of it. You are conflating transportation costs with nutrition and getting a meaningless argument. Take your local agenda elsewhere.
- BrianOnHN 5y ago
  This comment is spot on. Furthermore, this year alone, I've seen megatons of dead fish wash up within a week because of a single phosphorus(fertilizer) dump into the gulf. So to reiterate, eating fish isn't the problem. The current human role in our ecosystem, is.
- msh 5y ago
  Many places in the world you can only produce food locally in a limited season, so you have to store or import. I don't think import is naturally much worse than storage.
- heliodor 5y ago
  By the same logic, you should not be using Saudi Arabia's oil. Some places have more of something than they need for their own consumption. Trade makes sense.
  - Fnoord 5y ago
    We are, for now, dependant on fossil fuels (including from nefarious regimes). I like fish, practically all except coalfish/pollock/seelachs (which does have a nice advantage: cheap and widely available). Fish is supposedly a good sourcevon omega 3 fatty acids, vitamin D, and vitamin B13. Which are all 3 difficult to come by if you largely follow a vegan diet otherwise. Yes I have the choice of eating things like cowmilk, chicken eggs, and cheese, but I generally don't like them. For example, I only molten cheese and non-boiled eggs. So I end up regularly eating some Captain Iglo/Birdseye fish sticks which are cheap and mask the taste and structure of coalfish/pollock/seelachs. One time in a German restaurant we got excited. Seelachs, that's salmon, right? Wrong, salmon is lachs, seelachs is coalfish/pollock. Such disappointment while I see people getting served, price was too good to be true (it was a large group deal though). I ended up eating one bite. See, not many brands cover up the taste well. In this case, no seasoning whatsoever was used. The problem is, back 100 days ago, imported foods were a luxury. You'd eat local unless you were rich (most people were not). But we don't do that because those who pollute get away with it; they don't pay a fair share to destimulate the behaviour enough, and the bioindustry is very efficient and caused an availability of meat for the pleb folk. If we go on in this pace, major cities like Amsterdam are unlikely to exist in 2100. But voters don't seem to care, so the future of my children is likely not near the city they were born, they can vusit it by boat or drone or Maps by then, reading on Wikipedia what once and how adults failed. All because we were too greedy and unwilling to solve it on a macro level.
    - FDSGSG 5y ago
      >Wrong, salmon is lachs, seelachs is coalfish/pollock This is very much a deliberate (and successful) scam by the Germans, and not something that came about naturally. Seelachs is a trade name they came up with because "Kohler" didn't sound good enough. https://rp-online.de/leben/gesundheit/ernaehrung/seelachs-der-erfundene-fisch_aid-15780139 https://rp-online.de/leben/gesundheit/ernaehrung/seelachs-de...
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > The main culprit is land locked people eating far away foods, its not sustainable. > Everything should be optimized for local, in season consumption. Imported food aught to be a treat, not a staple. It's not like we don't know how this turns out. You're advocating for pretty severe malnutrition in a lot of landlocked populations.
- merrywhether 5y ago
  You’re basically saying that just because we haven’t been great at general fishery management yet doesn’t mean we won’t get it right next time. But the problem here is that fisheries are literally the textbook example of the tragedy of the commons and there will always be someone looking to capture the benefits while externalizing the costs. I’m not disagreeing with you that unsustainable eating is the root of this (and many other) problem but the only successful solutions has been extremely strong semi-militaristic (eg Coast Guard with teeth) enforcement of fishing quotas that are quite unpopular for all involved: fishers who lose jobs, eaters who lose access to a favorite taste, etc. No one likes taking their vitamins as it were.
- sweetheart 5y ago
  There is remarkably little environmental impact when it comes to shipping food around the world. Also, you say the problem is our extractive practices when it comes to nature. We only extract because people demand it. We ought to stop demanding it.

1cvmask 5y ago

The curious case of a country that sends its troops all over the world to “protect” the borders of other countries but strangely ignores its own border. Then again the government (through the CIA) was involved in drug running. So you want an unfortified border then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Alliance_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Alliance_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Webb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Webb

llamataboot 5y ago
I would hardly call the US border "ignored"
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  The US southern border is currently not enforced, thanks to Biden's Open Border policy. It's expected 2 million illegal migrants will walk across the Mexican border into the US in 2021.
  - toss1 5y ago
    riiight... that's why there's a scandal about border patrol on horseback rounding up migrants to be sent back to their home country, and significant encampments of people trying (i.e., failing) to get across; this is not merely open borders and walking across as you falsely imply. Stop posting propaganda
- frankharv 5y ago
  Your right about that. While the Feds have adjudicated their duties the state of Texas has had to step up and bring in state resources. Charging people with a misdemeanor trespassing charges as a last resort when the Border Patrol is hamstrung by politics. Why not build that wall? Just ask Poland about the value of a wall. Europe is finally realizing there is orderly migration on one hand and chaos by bandits on the other. Really sad situation. Poor people deserve better. To spend their life savings on human smuggling is a pity.

EdwardDiego 5y ago

Are the snapper perhaps a fair exchange for the US caused dramatic impacts on the health of the Colorado delta, and the resulting massive impact on the Kwapa, a people whose entire identity was based on the Colorado River? Silly question, but I find the article's tone of polite outrage a bit hypocritical. Bonus points for the DRUGGGS outrage angle. Especially when Texas used to be the province of Tejas, until the Anglos (who'd been invited) rebelled when Mexico tried to prevent illegal migration from the US, and banned slavery. Maybe Texas is a fair trade for snapper?

andrew_ 5y ago
Try to ignore the political aspects of this for a moment. The entire biome of the Gulf is at stake here when a single species is threatened. The Gulf might seem like it's a huge body of water on paper (and I mean, it is) but it's a rather small salt water ecosystem by comparison. The smaller the ecosystem, the bigger the impact of a disruption. NOAA, for all of their faults and some questionable season closures, have helped successfully bring back several species from near extinction and in doing so helped keep the entire Gulf fishery alive. It's bigger than petty politics. I've been fishing for snapper for the last 8 years in the Gulf off of the Florida coast, where most of the prized species are heavily regulated (and heavily fined for breaking regs). The Gulf has seen several rounds of disruption and keeps bouncing back. Keeping the Gulf healthy is not only the right thing to do from an environmental view, but also for what it provides to the people who live in states and countries surrounding it.
- cheese_van 5y ago
  I fished snapper all my life in the Gulf as well thinking it was unique to the Gulf. I was delighted to find red snapper in Indonesia during a visit there. The genus Lutjanus is a fairly well distributed in the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Ocean and they are all tasty. The beachside Indonesian practice is to cook them in smoke houses with coconut husks as fuel. Anyway, snapper is everywhere, and everywhere over-fished.
- splitstud 5y ago
  I've fished the gulf for 50 years. The gulf is better stocked with fish now than in my youth. The thanks for this goes to the GCCA and state regs.

echopurity 5y ago

Prohibition and carnism destroy the ocean along with countless lives? No surprise.

stevespang 5y ago

At the moment captains are reporting the snapper population offshore in Texas have never been better, in fact, this month the Federal season was reopened a bit for snapper. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has started using Texas National Guard and DPS troops to arrest and imprison illegals crossing the Texas land border - - -over 7,000 so far. Why not start arresting any illegal fishermen caught in Texas waters and auctioning off their boats far inland to US citizens to help pay for it ? Texas State waters go out 9 miles from the coast, and I have no problem with dragging any found out farther into Texas waters to arrest them. Time to put the cartels on notice . . .