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Alaska snow crab season canceled after disappearance of an estimated 1B crabs
- celestialcheese 4y agoThis is wild to see. Especially after one of the best salmon seasons this summer in AK. Prices being high helped, but the salmon population was excellent. Source: Family commercial fishes in AK
- rex_lupi 4y agoOverfishing, climate change, Corruption (US NOAA). See this thread: https://twitter.com/Unpop_Science/status/1581660239501283329 https://twitter.com/Unpop_Science/status/1581660239501283329
- ijidak 4y ago
- werdnapk 4y agoEarth isn't in trouble, but we are. Earth will continue on and we'll end up as a minor footnote in the history of the planet.
- LeifCarrotson 4y agoThe anthropocene will be visible in every history of the planet as one of the most rapid changes in every geologically and archaeologically observable metric, on the scale of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. The asteroid may vanished in a massive conflagration, but people don't talk about it because that particular lump of space rock went extinct, they talk about all the other changes that came about as a result of its admittedly short time in our atmosphere and ecosystem.
- conductr 4y ago> observable metric By who though? Our entire existence could very well be a tree falling in an empty forest.
- Dylan16807 4y agoBy whoever is making the footnotes.
- MisterSandman 4y agoCitation needed. It really depends on the geological time scale you're talking about. Geoscientists are still in debate of whether the Anthropocene should be added as it's epoch - yes, humans have had an impact, but it's hard to concretely state that the impact will be noticeable enough that another species would demarcate our existence as such.
- DesiLurker 4y agoNo earth is, there are things on the planet besides us and inanimate objects. There is a whole biosphere that we are destroying for small incremental gains. this is a very human-centric viewpoint. So what if a particular action does not improves standard of living for humans if it impacts billions of other species and breaks delicate ecosystems. Honestly I am at a point where I dont care as much about human prosperity (think higher levels of maslow's hierarchy of needs) as about saving the biosphere.
- tick_tock_tick 4y agoMeh, our ability to change the earth grows every year sooner or later we'll fix it.
- nyc_data_geek1 4y agoCitation needed
- tick_tock_tick 4y agoThat our ability to change the world is increasing? I mean we are clearly affecting it more then we ever had in the past. Or do you want a citation from the future?
- hamburglar 4y agoI think we’ve demonstrated that we can change the world in unintended ways, whereas your “meh” above assumes we can change it in intended ways.
- hyperbovine 4y agoI think (s)he was referring part about how we'll "definitely" know how to fix it before it's too late.
- masklinn 4y ago> (s)he English has a perfectly cromulent singular neutral, no need for that.
- irrational 4y agoBut, we always affect it in negative ways. Our ability to change the world in negative ways says nothing about our ability to ever fix it since we have absolutely no experience doing that.
- gcanyon 4y ago
- ASalazarMX 4y agoI understand your mindset, what I can't understand is why you offer religion as solace. These very real world problems won't pray themselves out. With your approach we might as well just act as if nothing is happening and be happy. That's a solution that might work for old people on their way out, but it's absurdly inadequate and insensitive for the young generations.
- tsol 4y ago>With your approach we might as well just act as if nothing is happening and be happy. That's what we're already doing, only we're not happy and the panic is making us collectively fight and make worse decisions. Calm people make better decisions than panicked people staring in the face of existential evaporation.
- virgildotcodes 4y agoMost environmentalists would argue that we've been far too calm, leading us to not take the issues seriously and not make the requisite drastic changes to our civilizations.
- voisin 4y ago> Our ability to change the earth for the worse exceeds our willingness to change ourselves for the better. Jack up the cost of carbon so that willingness to change increases and the relative cost of lower carbon options becomes more attractive. Right now we are effectively subsidizing our collective suicide by not internalizing externalities. It’s nuts.
- barbazoo 4y agoFrom your bio: > SEO, and Marketing are my passions. Over the last 36-months my ads have made $1.36+ million in sales. > Our ability to change the earth for the worse exceeds our willingness to change ourselves for the better. You know what you're talking about.
- dang 4y agoPlease don't cross into personal attack. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- outworlder 4y ago> On a serious note, Earth is in trouble. Earth is not in trouble. It has survived worse extinction events just fine. We, along with all current living species, are the ones in trouble.
- dang 4y agoPlease don't post unsubstantive comments to HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- washedup 4y agoWow, those are some crazy numbers. Shocking it could happen that fast... what's next?
- whymauri 4y agoI'm eating as much delicious sushi grade tuna I can before it's gone.
- Damogran6 4y agoYou and everybody else. That's the problem.
- whymauri 4y agoThere are many ways to solve the specific problem of overfishing, mostly to set aside zones where fishing is not allowed so the population can recover. This is at the level of government and states, having little to do with anything within my power.
- checker 4y agoCreating zones is one thing, enforcement is another. Hopefully technology can help solve this because I honestly don't see any other way - the oceans are too vast.
- jjk166 4y agoEnforcement is a solved problem - ships can be tracked by various means, ports where catches can be offloaded can be audited, crews can be arrested and ships impounded when in port. No one is going to overfish if they can't economically get their catch to market and get paid for their troubles. The issue is getting everyone to enforce the policies consistently - the leaders of different jurisdictions may not see eye to eye on what level of protection is optimal, and the people actually doing the enforcement may be willing to turn a blind eye to violations depending on circumstances.
- ilamont 4y agoSomething similar happened to the cod fishing industry in Newfoundland and other parts of eastern Canada 30 years ago. The reason: overfishing, due in large part to technological advances. Here's what happened: Canada and NAFO continued to overestimate the abundance of cod in the Atlantic Ocean and therefore continued to set dangerously high [Total Allowable Catches]. This was in large part due to the widespread practice of calculating cod populations from catch rates in the commercial fishery – if fishers filled their quotas with ease, then officials believed the stock size was at adequately high levels. However, fishing technology had become so efficient by the 1970s that commercial catch rates remained high even as the cod population dropped to dangerously low levels. Electronic tracking devices could find fish no matter how small their numbers and trawlers could harvest most species with relative ease. ... Although overfishing in international waters did tremendous damage to northern cod, Canada also failed to maintain a sustainable fishery within its 200-mile limit. The government ignored warnings from inshore fishers and university scientists that cod stocks were in danger and chose to maintain quotas instead of scaling back the fishery, in large part to prevent economic losses and massive unemployment. By the early 1990s, after decades of sustained intensive fishing from Canadian and international fleets, the northern cod stocks collapsed. The spawning biomass of northern cod had dropped by about 93 per cent in only 30 years – from 1.6 million tonnes in 1962 to between 72,000 and 110,000 tonnes in 1992. In July of that year, Canada imposed a moratorium on the catching of northern cod and ended an international industry that had endured for close to 500 years. https://www.heritage.nf.ca/articles/economy/moratorium.php https://www.heritage.nf.ca/articles/economy/moratorium.php They called off the season in 1992 and it never came back. A pillar of the local economy in the Maritimes was wrecked. As for climate change and its impact on East Coast fishing, I've read that lobster fishing is no longer a viable industry in Long Island and it's declining in southern New England as waters get warmer and the lobsters permanently migrate north.
- beefman 4y agoGreat song about it by Finest Kind (sadly not properly available online): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX6dJgmof0E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX6dJgmof0E
- 4y ago
- xutopia 4y agoThe overfished. Simple as that. Snow crabs have been becoming smaller and smaller because the biggest ones were not living that long anymore. It happened to cod fisheries in eastern Canada and it is happening everywhere until it's too late.
- oesexe 4y agoCOD, the fish that changed the world. Amazingly well written book. Apparently Cod used to be MUCH larger than it is today. for the same reason, they dont grow very old.
- nemo44x 4y agoMany fish were much larger in the not so distant past. Marlin in Caribbean used to be huge compared to todays catch. Pictures from the 1950's and earlier, you see some just massive Marlin. They're big today but nothing like how they used to be. But we have a whole lot more people on the Earth today.
- wahern 4y ago> "We are eating bait and moving on to jellyfish and plankton", [University of British Columbia fisheries scientist] Pauly said. http://articles.latimes.com/2006/jul/30/local/la-me-ocean30jul30 http://articles.latimes.com/2006/jul/30/local/la-me-ocean30j... (https://web.archive.org/web/20161010003945/http://articles.latimes.com/2006/jul/30/local/la-me-ocean30jul30 https://web.archive.org/web/20161010003945/http://articles.l...), p3
- disqard 4y agoThank you for sharing those, esp. the one about Lyngbya majuscula blooms.
- nickfromseattle 4y agoHere is an article that highlights this change. Just scroll the pictures, don't need to read the words. https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/02/05/257046530/big-fish-stories-getting-littler https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/02/05/257046530/b...
- boxmonster 4y ago
- yamazakiwi 4y agoI can't tell if you're being sarcastic but with this name I hope you are because it's hilarious.
- advantager 4y agohttps://imgur.com/855O98r https://imgur.com/855O98r
- boxmonster 4y agoI'm joking but I expected to get [dead] so it's nice to see HN has a sense of humor sometimes!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ASalazarMX 4y agoIt's a parody cover. That twitter account is hilarious: https://twitter.com/paprbckparadise/status/1251269396112093185 https://twitter.com/paprbckparadise/status/12512693961120931...
- masklinn 4y agoAlternatively, the antagonists of much of Neal Asher’s polity series are spacefaring crustaceans.
- jeffbee 4y ago
- bombcar 4y agoWhat about farmed trout? https://www.clearsprings.com https://www.clearsprings.com
- yamazakiwi 4y agoAccording to clearsprings >Farmed seafood, in general, is a sustainable option, requiring far less feed per pound compared to other farmed sources of protein like beef, pork, and chicken. That is one advantage if true but that just means more sustainable than beef, pork, and chicken. Is there a condition that would prevent their farming? Like the accessibility of the feed?
- bombcar 4y ago> Conventional operations use large amounts of fishmeal and fish oil (and hence more wild fish) in their feed. All rainbow trout on the U.S. market is farmed-raised in the U.S., where farming operations are held to strict environmental standards. Improvements to feed have enabled less wild fish to be used. https://seafood.edf.org/trout https://seafood.edf.org/trout So I guess they harvest wild fish to feed the farmed fish?
- mickdeek86 4y agoFishmeal and oil are byproducts of processing the filets
- bombcar 4y agoThey can’t feed the fish only parts of previous fish or they’d run out of material pretty fast - like a recycling center with no external inputs.
- mattw2121 4y agoKing Salmon fishing was shut down in much of Alaska this season as well. I was there during the time and driving through the Kenai Peninsula was much different than previous years. Normally, you'll see people lined up on the river all over the place.
- cluoma 4y agoAt the Whitehorse dam we also had one of the lowest counts of Chinook on record this year. Not looking good for northern sea life at the moment.
- reaperducer 4y agoThere was at least one piece of good news this year. The river that hosts the Fat Bear competition had a record number of salmon this year. I think the estimate was 74 million.
- raydiatian 4y agoCthulhu
- UnpossibleJim 4y agoI just assume Douglas Adams got it wrong and it's the crabs that left instead of the dolphins =P
- raydiatian 4y ago“So long, and thanks for all the detritus”
- melony 4y agoThey had their neurons uploaded into Slavic machine learning systems. Stross wants his lobsters back!
- irrational 4y agoWell, I don't like any seafood, so, on the one hand this does not affect me at all. On the other hand... this is just one more piece of data to add to the ever growing pile of how badly we are ruining the planet for any life above the level of single cell organisms. We are screwed.
- gremlinsinc 4y agoSure it does. The billions who subsist on seafood will now have to eat eggs, pork, beef. This will cause supply issues of those things. If you're a vegetarian you might be safe, though those too will be in higher demand maybe. There's also water shortages, see the drought that's drying up the Mississippi river. Without water we'll have less and less crop yields. We slowly had changes happen over 3 decades, then all of a sudden hit a turning point where we're breaking records yearly, maybe even monthly, and starting to get some feedback loops brewing. The govts of the world though don't seem to think it's a big priority, lucky for them they're all ran by old people who will be dead before it really gets out of hand.
- cmsj 4y ago> "billions who subsist on seafood will now have to eat eggs, pork, beef" There is another possible outcome... :/
- killjoywashere 4y agoYeah, no one "subsists" on eggs, pork, and beef. Subsistence diets are rice and beans. Anyone eating beef on a regular basis is living well. Like, kings of history well.
- mikro2nd 4y agoSoylent Green? (referring to the original 1970s movie, not the faux-food thing some grifter tried to flog a few years ago)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- suzzer99 4y agoDid anyone else read this is 18 crabs and wonder what the heck was going on?
- pgrote 4y agoThe Seattle Times joined followed a carb boat in April of 2022. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/into-the-ice-a-crab-boats-quest-for-snow-crab-in-a-bering-sea-upended-by-climate-change/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/into-t... The captain's take on the issue includes climate change, over crabbing areas known to be struggling and trawling. The article also includes an explanation as to how cod could be responsible due to climate change offering less ice protection for the crab.
- DFHippie 4y ago> carb boat Heh heh. I imagine fishermen hauling in a net full of potatoes and pasta.
- 60secs 4y agoA bread bowl with a propeller
- agumonkey 4y ago"The Floating Potato"
- unknownaccount 4y ago
- mattanimation 4y ago
- javea71 4y ago
- dotancohen 4y agoInteresting. I imagined fishermen hauling in a net full of choke springs and accelerator pump gaskets.
- guywithahat 4y agoI don't like how they keep blaming climate change, even though that doesn't seem to be what happened here. We just had one of the best seasons for crab fishing; does CBS expect us to think climate change in the last year ruined this season? Much more likely is disease, some new techniques in crab fishing that over harvested the sea, or random deviation.
- Daishiman 4y ago
- chasd00 4y ago
- nharada 4y ago"Larger statistical variance caused by climate change results in outlier event that kills 90% of crab" isn't a great headline. What do you need to believe that climate change is a factor in this event? A sample size of 1 million? A deviation of 5 sigma?
- guywithahat 4y agoThis is my point though. Over the last 110 years the US has gone up about ~1'F https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-us-and-global-temperature https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica... This, in theory, changes every aspect of life by some amount, however minuscule or large it may be. In the case of king crab fishing though we haven't really seen a downward trend. What we've seen is some really good seasons, new techniques, and now very few fish. People like to explain everything away due to climate change but it seems more logical to me this is random deviation or the result of new technology or bad practices by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Assuming this follows a normal distribution we would expect a shortage of crab by over 2 standard deviations in 50 year intervals (or after ~25 years of beginning our recording), and below 3 standard deviations if we repeat this 20 times. We could explain this away perfectly fine without invoking climate change
- carapace 4y agoCheck out Dana (Donella) Meadows Lecture: Sustainable Systems (Part 2 of 4) - 2013 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuIoego-xVc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuIoego-xVc
- darth_avocado 4y agoI am willing to bet it is illegal fishing boats from countries I dare not to list for being downvoted. It is well known that some countries list a few hundred boats but in reality have fleets of tens of thousands of boats that operate under the radar. They over fish and destroy entire ecosystems and no one is doing anything about it.
- krastanov 4y agoBut China is overfishing in the public, not "under the radar", and they usually only go up to someones territorial waters, do not completely cross. Moreover, I very much doubt they would dare do so to a semi-powerful western state, let alone the US. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/insider/a-clear-look-at-chinas-deep-sea-fishing.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/insider/a-clear-look-at-c...
- ROTMetro 4y agoI remember chilling north coast of Santa Cruz late one night after a surf sesh, and boats pulling up to shore, unloading people and other items. This was right about when (was it Golden Budda?) in Soquel got busted for smuggling chinese machine guns? Sure they cross territorial waters. (Man I was bummed. They had the best hot and sour soup.) Edite: Yep, it was Golden Buddha https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Smuggler-of-Chinese-arms-pleads-guilty-3116012.php https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Smuggler-of-Chinese-arms...
- pphysch 4y agoOr there are corrupt fishery regulators who are giving wild overestimations of fish population in return for kickbacks from fishery associations/cartels. If it was the Big Bad, there would be political uproar. But if it was good ole corruption, it would be business as usual.
- woodruffw 4y agoDo you have any evidence to back this up, or is this just xenophobic speculation? China’s encroachment on sovereign waters for fishing is one thing when it’s against South American countries with small navies; it’s another thing entirely when it’s the US. I doubt they’re behind this.
- paxys 4y ago"Disappearance" is a weird way to say overfishing. It's not like someone cast a spell or something.
- anigbrowl 4y agoThey could have died from the crab equivalent of a deadly heatwave. I agree fishing is the most likely reason but I can think of others.
- glonq 4y agoNext season on Discovery's Deadliest Catch: Sig and Wild Bill learn how to knit.
- gremlinsinc 4y agoAt least we still have lab grown meat, as it appears we'll soon have to get all our sustenance from labs since we'll probably be the last living creature on earth, sooner than later.
- glonq 4y ago/me runs off quick to trademark "lab crab"
- tzs 4y agoSig went to fish in Norway, and Discovery is covering that [1]. [1] https://www.discovery.com/shows/deadliest-catch-the-viking-returns https://www.discovery.com/shows/deadliest-catch-the-viking-r...
- inopinatus 4y ago
- gmd63 4y agoBubbles don't just happen in finance. They happen in biology.
- harveywi 4y agoPossibly the same estimated 1B crabs that disappeared from Twitter when the Elon Musk deal was announced.
- jcynix 4y agoOverfishing? Remember sardines and Cannery Row in Monterey? Today it doesn't look much better, it seems: https://www.montereyherald.com/2020/11/03/the-sardine-war-hits-a-lull-but-the-tides-are-rising/ https://www.montereyherald.com/2020/11/03/the-sardine-war-hi...
- outworlder 4y agoHow feasible is it to grow crabs in captivity? We need to start farming food, no way natural ecosystems can support themselves _and_ humans at current levels.
- thr0wawayf00 4y agoNo idea, but I see more plant-based food in our future generally. It's gotta be way, way cheaper to farm crops than fauna and farm-raised seafood comes with it's own issues with mercury, etc.
- TheGigaChad 4y ago
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y agoInterestingly, raising animals in captivity is much much more difficult than I imagined. IIRC - Guns, Germs, and Steel had a pretty good point that we didn't so much domesticate animals and plants as there were plants and animals that were pre-disposed to domestication.
- cmsj 4y agoYeah for sure. Lion could well be 10x more delicious than beef for all I know, but I'm quite certain we couldn't farm millions of lions.
- llbeansandrice 4y agoMeat from carnivores tends to not be very good/tasty for a variety of reasons. iirc most of it is mainly due to the fact that other carnivores process meat similarly to how humans do so it's not as nutritious/tasty. Also many carnivores tend to also kind of be scavengers whose meat is generally quite quite bad.
- ggm 4y agoIt's a common trope to state bad input taints meat taste but I think it's unproven. I think it's more likely that apex diet concentration of complex organic molecules causes taste differences. Feed pigs on acorns exclusively, yes you get a specific ?malic? Acid outcome in fat. Feed sheep on seaweed, same with iodine. Corn vs grass fed beef, same. But "predators eat trashy meat so their flesh is trashy" doesn't ring true. "Obligate carnivore predators in the feline family process meat differently, and emit proteins into their own flesh" may be a mouthful but it's where I am. Think swordfish and mercury
- WalterBright 4y agoOverfishing is a classic problem of "Tragedy of the Commons". The oceans are the commons. For example, nobody is predicting a catastrophic decline in the population of pigs, chickens, and cattle. Fish farming is the future.
- myshpa 4y agoVeganism is the (only logical) future.
- Spivak 4y agoThe issue is that people en masse don’t actually care all that much about the cruelty of killing animals so long as it’s not reasonably torturous. The future, however dystopian you may see it, is sustainably growing the animals we want to eat for slaughter.
- virgildotcodes 4y agoThe concept of "reasonably torturous" is pretty wild.
- chrisfrantz 4y agoAgreed, if you have to include the word torture in the descriptor of food production than there’s already an ethical problem to solve.
- hayst4ck 4y agoWhat is the ethical problem? What kind of solution would there be? How would that philosophical thinking apply to other apex predators, such as spiders who poison and wrap their prey while they hopeless wriggle to death for minutes or snakes who suffocate their prey to death sometimes breaking major bones, or a cat killing a rodent for fun? Do we have a responsibility to intervene against other torturous predators, why or why not? I am curious about your philosophical reasoning on the topic, I am not asking rhetorically.
- djmips 4y ago"Hope and pray." - yeah that'll solve it!
- WalterBright 4y agoIf I was prez, I'd reserve a number of offshore "national parks" where no fishing of any sort is allowed.
- twawaaay 4y agoYou know, the difference is that marine animals travel a lot more than land animals.
- wiredfool 4y agoOddly enough, there’s decent evidence that preserves that ban fishing are effective for preserving the biodiversity in the larger region that includes zones where fishing is allowed.
- acdha 4y agoThinking about how many sea animals produce large quantities of offspring, I wonder if the answer is that while normally competition for food & predators limit how many survive in those situations a fair number can expand out of the protected area, with the predator population artificially low after having crashed along with whatever was overfished.
- lcfcjs 4y ago
- underbluewaters 4y agoSearch "Marine Protected Areas", they are definitely a thing. US Presidents also have a habit of designating Marine Monuments as they exit office.
- cmsj 4y agoMaybe it was the crab rapture?
- wonderwonder 4y agoa billion seems like such a huge number when you consider its referring to giant crabs. Had no idea there were that many; but never really thought about it. Seems insane for there to be that many let alone for that many to be missing.
- Maursault 4y agoI'm just curious what percentage of HN members diets is snow crab, and my point is snow crab isn't corn, wheat or chicken, and the only people this is going to affect are the snow crab fisherman, their families, and the economy of the towns in which they live and spend.
- eclipxe 4y ago10% of mine
- Maursault 4y agoThat seems like a lot. More than once a day? Or the only thing you eat every 10th day?
- andy_andy_andy 4y agoi think the takeaway of the story isn't specifically that this season's snow crab season is cancelled, but that a population has collapsed because of some combination of climate change or overfishing. even if you don't eat crab it's bad news when 1 billion crabs go missing.
- Maursault 4y ago> it's bad news when 1 billion crabs go missing. It's shocking, and yet not all that surprising.
- shakezula 4y agoThis is a super shortsighted view. Every life form in the ocean plays a role in the ecosystem and catastrophic damages like this have first and second order effects all over the place.
- Maursault 4y agoI'm pretty sure my point was the only reason for harvesting snow crab is that it is lucrative for these fisherman, yet snow crab isn't an important staple of any diet, so there was absolutely no compelling societal reason to fish them into population collapse or extinction, not even greed. My suspicion is the majority of the product here was wasted, rotted and discarded, so we should really put pressure on commercial fishers in the US and abroad to find another way to support themselves in order to stop them from killing everything in the ocean rather than romanticize a way of life that is economically and ecologically unsustainable, such as is inexplicably done for ranchers, nor should we frame them as sympathetic victims of climate change.
- baskethead 4y agoI mean is there any mystery here? It's China. China doesn't care about anything except for themselves. Hundreds of Chinese fishing boats set up just outside of international waters in South America and fished everything in the area and brought it back to China. It's like a sick game of Age of Empires but millions of people are affected.
- artificial 4y agoThe fleet is big enough to be seen from space. Neat animation of some activity here [0] and AP story https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB6-bAF9B8A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB6-bAF9B8A
- baskethead 4y agoAs far as I'm concerned the countries impacted by those fishing cities should quietly torpedo them. It's a crime against humanity and if China can't support their own population with food they create themselves, they should cull their own population, not selfishly create famine for other countries by overfishing everything they can get their hands on.
- artificial 4y agoBTW here's a better presentation of some of the fleet, it's enraging. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/26/world/asia/china-fishing-south-america.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/26/world/asia/ch...
- jandrewrogers 4y agoThis doesn't pass the sniff test. The US has the most capable and dominant naval presence on the planet and they use it. Nothing happens near their territorial waters without their permission and they see it coming long before it happens. The "ghost fleet" fishing incidents -- which are a real concern -- happen to countries with minimal maritime defenses. You can blame China for many things but this definitely isn't one of them. Episodic fishery collapses are a thing that occurs naturally aside from fishing activity, and the Alaskan fishery is one of the best managed in the world.
- vonwoodson 4y agoYo’ Mama so fat that…
- timcavel 4y ago
- hannasm 4y agoWhat of the other parts of the world willing to fish into extinction? It's nice to hear we are doing something to benefit a species that is suffering but is this anything? Are we not just driving them into someone else's snare?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- greenyouse 4y agoSince we're all speculating, I would guess that ocean acidification could be at play here. The arctic regions are carbon sinks so they experience acidification earlier than other parts of the ocean. When the CO2 is absorbed into the ocean it causes the pH level to decrease, making the waters more acidic. This inhibits CaCO3 (calcium carbonate) formation found in many ocean species like crabs. If there's a rapid die off of this magnitude there aren't many other problems which would match this level of impact. It could be something else environmental like the water temperature but it doesn't seem like an anthropogenic problem. Similar problems have happened already for other species like oysters.[0] I was an intern with NOAA in a fisheries lab studying ocean acidification back in college in 2011. There was a large die off in oyster farms the year before which wiped out a good size of their production. The issue then was that the farms were cycling the water in directly from the ocean into the tanks without adjusting the pH. As the pH in the ocean water dropped, it killed off all of the oysters in the farms all at once. They had to do a quick about face to treat the water to regain the catch. Ocean acidification seemed like a problem that would get worse and worse over time. The estimate back then was that it would take roughly 50 years for the CO2 in the air to equilibrate with the CO2 in the ocean. Since we won't stop emitting any time soon it's going to get a lot more acidic. I'm a decade behind on the status but back then it seemed like there were a lot of unknowns around the problem too. I'm not sure if more has come to light on the impacts it might have for ecology or the biochemistry of different species. It was a complex problem so predicting the outcome seemed extremely difficult. Hopefully more is known but if not surprises like this would likely crop up. For shellfish, once it goes under a certain pH threshold for a species the young will be unable to form shells which can cause them to die en mass in a short time period. It doesn't seem like a problem that we can engineer our way out of. The best we can do is probably to monitor and perform science experiments to see some of it coming. Then try to mitigate the damage. It seems like NOAA would have been able to call out the calcification problem for the snow crab in advance though since there have been issues with other crab species.[1] They probably would have detected the pH change in the waters too so this might not be the cause. Either way it's an interesting subject to learn about. [0] https://blogs.oregonstate.edu/breakingwaves/2011/06/28/ocean-acidification-trouble-for-oysters/ https://blogs.oregonstate.edu/breakingwaves/2011/06/28/ocean... [1] https://research.noaa.gov/article/ArtMID/587/ArticleID/2581/Dungeness-crab-showing-impact-of-coastal-acidification https://research.noaa.gov/article/ArtMID/587/ArticleID/2581/... NOAA's ocean acidification program https://oceanacidification.noaa.gov/Home.aspx https://oceanacidification.noaa.gov/Home.aspx This was a good 2011 report from the IPCC if you're interested. https://www.ipcc.ch/publication/ipcc-workshop-on-ocean-acidification-on-marine-biology-and-ecosystems/ https://www.ipcc.ch/publication/ipcc-workshop-on-ocean-acidi...
- deadiiy 4y ago
- Manu40 4y agoMy current employer was just talking about how the cost of seafood is rising because of things like this. Don't expect your plate of crab or lobster to be cheap these next few years folks. And if it is cheap somehow, stop eating there. They are probably part of the problem.
- beowulfey 4y agoIn the northeastern US this past summer the price of lobster was maybe 30% higher than previous years (in my area anyway)
- Manu40 4y agoRight, and so with that, demand should taper down a bit. But only until other things become more expensive and now that food source is the cheaper one...
- DoingIsLearning 4y agoYeah the price of seafood is the real problem here, the canary is dead but lets keep digging deeper, things are bound to improve.
- Manu40 4y agoHeh, I get the joke. But really, is it really the problem? I'm considering the idea from both angles of supply and demand right now. I mean, once upon a time ago, stuff like crab and lobster was considered poor persons food. It was so plentiful that the story goes 'You could just walk down to the local ocean side and scoop some out of the ocean without any trouble'. The way I see it is this. Pricing is indicative of supply and demand. If demand is high enough, suppliers will attempt to meet that demand. When demand wanes, supply burgeons, thus creating a reason to lower prices so that demand matches supply again. So in a sense, while price would seem to be the culprit, I think it more or less comes down to the fickle nature of the human. Take red lobster for example. I never eat there, because they always somehow have some 'sale' happening. This means one of two things for me. Either they are selling old product as "fresh" which is not possible in many places they operate, or they are selling under the 'actual' price to increase demand to help meet supply. Now extend that to the rest of the industry. Where does that land us? In my mind, it means we are over fishing the species, all because other companies like RL allow for it to happen by continuously artificially spiking demand. Because at the end of the day, even if RL doesn't make profit, the fishermen do. RL and others like them keep buying it. It doesn't matter to the supplier of these restaurants if the food is being eaten or tossed. It's already caught. Make sense?
- alliao 4y agohow old are the crabs when we harvest them? if they have long lifespan then it'd take just as long to turn the tide
- padjo 4y ago“In a major blow to America's seafood industry…” - says it all about how incredibly messed up our priorities are.
- black_puppydog 4y agoI "like" how the beginning of the segment states the "biggest impact" is gonna be on the fishing economy, not on the restaurants. I'd argue the biggest impact is on... the crab population? Guess nobody really cares for those after all. In which case losing them serves us well.
- philosopher1234 4y agoWe are like coal to be burned as fuel for capital
- tenpies 4y agoNot quite. That is the carbon cycle. We just came along and put some faces on paper so we could stop killing each other over whose fishermen get to catch crab. Then we called it capitalism and pretended that our economic systems transcend natural science.
- moffkalast 4y agoThis kills the crab
- Sargos 4y ago> I'd argue the biggest impact is on... the crab population? The biggest impact of a lower crab population is a lower crab population. That's tautological, makes no sense, and why the article doesn't mention it. The decline in population already happened.
- tsol 4y agoTo be fair, news on the economy gets more clicks than news about falling animal populations. Just another perverse incentive that makes the system the way it is
- sysihyk 4y ago
- fredgrott 4y agoNo one speaks of the elephants in the room 1. Russia is well known to fish illegally in bearing Seas 2.There was a boom in warm waters for warm water fish that some fisherman switched to, if you watch a certain Discovery series you know which fish even. 3.Alaska is one of the states that succeeded in protecting fish populations as opposed to some other US states.
- Technik500 4y ago
- Technik500 4y ago
- Tucanix 4y agoThe Kraken ate them.