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Does anyone find it ridiculous to try to target an market based solution to the problem through intentionally overfishing a species to extinction? Is that how
by twobitshifter 4y ago
Does anyone find it ridiculous to try to target an market based solution to the problem through intentionally overfishing a species to extinction? Is that how we believe fishing markets work?
If you really want to eliminate the species, you don’t need people to find them palatable. You just need to pay per carp. Look at what was nefariously done to the bison, with the famous photos of the stacked bison skulls. We didn’t need to first build a marketing campaign to sell bison burgers, it was simply cash for kills. You could of course put the carp into dog food fish sticks or whatever, but it sounds like this is an emergency and not something that can wait for diets to adapt.
- unintendedcons 4y agoCareful with those economic incentives https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive#The_original_cobra_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive#The_origi...
- amanaplanacanal 4y agoI seem to remember this being tried with rats, and it led to people breeding rats for money.
- aurizon 4y agoin 1947 in the UK, there was a £10 (10 pound) bounty to incent people to examine field potatoes in detail for the beetle and their caterpillars. £10 was 3-4 weeks wages then. Soon beetle breeders emerged and by mid summer the bounty was abolished - the new DDT was used.
- aurizon 4y agoSorry, that was the Colorado Potato Beetle - I forgot to name it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_potato_beetle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_potato_beetle
- Caligatio 4y agoThis sounds similar to the Great Hanoi Rat Massacre (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hanoi_Rat_Massacre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hanoi_Rat_Massacre) where people got paid per tail but ended up breeding more rats to get more tails. Bison take much longer to have a calf (9.5 months + 7-8 months of nursing) and typically only have one calf per go around. Carp, on the other hand, produce about two million eggs per year. It's much easier to depopulate bison than invasive carp.
- twobitshifter 4y agohaha, they could indeed happen, but if they are as pervasive as publicized wouldn’t it take a while to get to the point where it makes more sense to breed them instead of just catching them in the wild? maybe it’s best to just give someone the job and pay them a salary? I still don’t like relying on people getting an appetite for copi as the solution.
- Caligatio 4y agoI sadly forgot where I read about it (maybe "Under a White Sky" by Elizabeth Kolbert) but the States do already pay people to mass-cull these Asian carp by the literal ton (found https://blogs.illinois.edu/view/7362/827782934 https://blogs.illinois.edu/view/7362/827782934 specifically about this point). It's crazy what extremes governments are going to try to contain these fish - to include generating an electric field in rivers that selectively kills fish over a certain size (i.e. Asian carp).