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It's not just the draughts. https://www.seaspiracy.org/facts https://www.seaspiracy.org/facts "Species like thresher, bull and hammerhead sharks have lost up
by myshpa 4y ago
It's not just the draughts.
https://www.seaspiracy.org/facts https://www.seaspiracy.org/facts
"Species like thresher, bull and hammerhead sharks have lost up to 80-99% of their populations in the last two decades.
Seabird populations have declined by 70% since the 1950's.
Studies estimate that up to 40% of all marine life caught is thrown overboard as bycatch.
Six out of seven species of sea turtles are either threatened or endangered due to fishing.
Over 300,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises are killed as bycatch every year.
2.7 trillion fish are caught every year, or up to 5 million caught every minute.
Fish populations are in decline to near extinction.
- bradleyjg 4y agoStudies estimate that up to 40% of all marine life caught is thrown overboard as bycatch. This is a fairly important part. It’s one thing to fish and eat. It’s another thing to fish and destroy. Trawling is the strip mining of the sea.
- jandrewrogers 4y agoIn the US, you are required to discard bycatch under penalty of law. As a professional fisherman you aren't even allowed to eat it. They don't want to discard it, they are required to. The regulation nominally exists to disincentivize bycatch but anecdotally it seems to just ensure that bycatch becomes waste.
- XorNot 4y agoIf you're allowed to keep bycatch, then the incentive to reduce it is suddenly gone - easier to just find a way to accidentally also make money off it.
- pvaldes 4y ago> it seems to just ensure that bycatch becomes waste. Not exactly. Bycatch becomes energy diverted towards the scavengers part of the trophic chain. They are feeding other animals with it.
- wil421 4y agoThere’s a big difference between bycatch you can’t keep and being required to throw away all bycatch, I’m presuming that’s what you mean. NOAA states: >Fishermen sometimes catch and discard animals they do not want, cannot sell, or are not allowed to keep. There’s a huge difference in not allowed to keep and we would keep for ourselves. If you’re netting a bunch of undersized fish you have to release them, I catch lots of undersized fish I’d love to eat but I’m not legally allowed to. https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/insight/understanding-bycatch https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/insight/understanding-bycatch
- bradleyjg 4y agoIt would be better to ban the type of fishing that produces enormous bycatch and also destroy the seabed.
- tap-snap-or-nap 4y agoGovernments and corporations lack motivation to cease this behavior, as there are continually available markets willing to pay for and meeting consumer demands. One of those major issues that seems likely to drown with a million other major issues.
- nimbius 4y agowild...as a hunter who has made the trek to California a few times for Javelina hog and black bear, i had no clue they even offered a permit for salmon at all...its just not something advertised much.
- yesenadam 4y agoIt makes me ashamed to be human. Reading stuff like that, and thinking about what we do to cows, sheep, lambs, chickens, etc, it dawned on me a while ago that humans have no right to treat animals like they're just a bunch of cells to be treated however we want, like a serial killer treats their victims. But that animals are fellow beings, a lot like us in many ways. I didn't want pain, or someone to kill me, so I figured they didn't either. It was so easy to stop eating animal "products". The whole thing started to seem obscene, like a nightmare - ads on TV trying to tempt people to eat slaughtered baby sheep etc. I thought I'd miss the taste of meat but never have. (I feel so weird writing that sentence now.) I encourage everyone reading this not to be a part of the problem, to stop contributing to this desecration. If no-one ate meat, this genocide of sea life would just stop. For every person that stops, we get closer to that. I realize in some cultures, it's not so simple, but in many, it is.
- CalRobert 4y agoWe moved to the Irish countryside and hearing the dairy cows wailing for their calves that have just been taken away from them is an uexpected meat/dairy deterrent.
- beckler 4y agoWhen I was much younger, we had a donkey that had a breach birth, and the foal became stuck. It was awful, in every sense of the word. The foal ended up dying mid-birth, and we then did everything we could to save the mother. To the point where we were had a chain wrapped around the dead foal for pulling, and we had to cut up and break its bones to get it out. We eventually saved the mother, but that donkey was truly scarred. For about two years, I would of said that donkey was clinically depressed. It really changed my perspective on just how intelligent animals actually are, and I’m sure they feel complex emotions just like us.
- cmrdporcupine 4y agoHeartbreaking story. I had never paid much attention to donkeys until the neighbours got one a couple years ago. They really are a fascinatingly emotive and sensitive animal and more like a pet than typical livestock. It comes up to the fence to socialize with us and get snuggles, and rubs noses with our border collies. It plays with their German Shepherd and with their kids in the yard. It likes to snuggle. It is protective of the miniature goats and sheep that it cohabits with. I expected it to be more similar to a horse, but it's different. Far less aloof. Kind of want one of my own now.
- wazoox 4y agoAnd in EU, the French government just announced that it will "strongly oppose" forbidding deep ocean scrubbing nets in "protected areas" (which are therefore totally unprotected). They look like caricature villains from a comic book or something. Bonkers. For history, here's the criminal, senseless moron, shame on him, shame on them all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtfGFt1c5H8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtfGFt1c5H8
- favaq 4y ago[flagged]
- Marcan 4y agoIs that some sort of racist comment? 30 seconds of Google search would've told you that he's a French citizen, speaking in the french senate in that video.
- rjzzleep 4y agoI was about to give him the benefit of a doubt, but literally 6 seconds in there is a French republic flag in the bottom left. No need to search on Google.
- pertymcpert 4y agoYou have a history of posting thinly veiled racist comments.
- donkeyd 4y agoThe Dutch experimented with pulse fishing [0]. This had some good benefits for the sea and didn't seem to negatively impact the fishing industry over here much. It was banned again by the EU, according to some due to lobbying on behalf of other countries that were afraid they'd have to start investing in it too. 0: https://www.wur.nl/en/dossiers/file/pulse-fishing.htm https://www.wur.nl/en/dossiers/file/pulse-fishing.htm
- 4y ago
- lumost 4y agoHow does this affect plankton levels? Without predation we’d expect biomass to appear elsewhere, right?
- HarryHirsch 4y agoOverfishing usually results in jellyfish blooms - if there are no fish to consume the available zooplankton then jellyfish will. There's stacks and stacks of papers written on that phenomenon.
- midoridensha 4y agoSo people just need to start harvesting jellyfish and eating them instead of fish.
- pvaldes 4y ago> So people just need to start harvesting jellyfish and eating them instead of fish. Why to eat stupid jellyfishes when all that you need to enjoy a 100% nutritive and delicious diet is to start eating other people?. Hoomans are plenty, easy to find, fatty, err sorry... enormous, yummy, delicious and had everything that our body needs. Can we talk seriously again now? Only the 0,0001% of the jellyfish species are edible and they are basically a water globe devoid of nutrients.
- myshpa 4y agoPhytoplankton Population Drops 40 Percent Since 1950 ... that translates to an annual drop of about 1 percent https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/phytoplankton-population/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/phytoplankton-pop... [2008]
- rcpt 4y agoCancel all commercial fishing
- 14 4y agoI would love to see all commercial fishing banned as well for something like 10 years. Unfortunately there are other countries that would not respect the ban and even if not countries, individuals would ignore it as it would create a black market. I still think the idea should be discussed and maybe g20 nations come up with some agreements. Hopefully things like lab grown fish improve and maybe we can move people away from the real thing. I keep telling my kids they are lucky anytime we get the treat of having some fish as in their future it may not be something available to the common person.
- oppositelock 4y agoLab grown fish are one thing, but simple fish farms already work really well, the issues are that the fish don't eat a natural diet and are sicker and less healthy to eat. Maybe that's an easier problem to solve than growing fish meat in a lab.
- 14 4y agoLikely we could use both methods and see what works best. I’m not sure how well fish farms scale up but imagine lab grown meats will scale up.
- ROTMetro 4y agoFarmed fish are fed pellets made of wild caught fish though.
- nradov 4y agoThat depends on the species. Farmed catfish eat mostly soybeans and corn (maize).
- 4y ago
- narrator 4y agoThe law of supply and demand expects the marginal cost of each additional fish to be more expensive. What if it's not. What if it costs the same amount of money to catch fish until you catch the very last fish. Suddenly the price of fish jumps from $.03/fish to infinity. Some sort of quota system has to be implemented and enforced to not come to such an abrupt halt on a market like that. Fish is one thing, at least there are alternatives, but peak oil, or peak natural gas are going to be, barring some technological mitigation, catastrophic to our modern way of life.
- nerdponx 4y agoI remember one of my undergrad economics professors going on a rant about how we will never run out of oil or tungsten or whatever because the marginal cost will increase gradually until we find alternative materials. It sounded very intelligent and convincing to me at 18, and sounds downright idiotic to me now.
- oppositelock 4y agoThis is different than fish, as tungsten is recyclable and doesn't rot. Read up on the Simon/Ehrlich wager. Nobody knows the future, but your professor was demonstrating a solid economic principle.
- nerdponx 4y agoI know that oil and tungsten are materially different from fish. Marginal costs of digging things out of the ground does in fact tend to increase gradually with scarcity, as do incentives to devote resources to basic research into recycling, consumption reduction, and alternatives. But teaching undergrads about tungsten and not fish is just propaganda. Edit: To be clear, the point is not that my professor was idiotically wrong about oil and tungsten specifically. The "idiotic" part is to assume and furthermore imply to young students (who don't know any better) that the general principle holds equally well in all domains. Maybe "arrogant" would be a better word than "idiotic".
- BurningFrog 4y agoThis is a classic Tragedy Of The Commons. Establish ownable fishing rights per ocean areas, and regular greed will solve this problem.
- myshpa 4y agoWe've heard similar arguments in post-soviet countries regarding farming land - private land owners will take better care of the land, will protect the wildlife, won't poison their own land, etc. Privatization didn't help ... small owners rent their land to the big ag, wildlife is still being decimated, land degradation accelerated, and now there are new deserts in central Europe (last week there was a sand storm in Hungary and Slovakia).
- bitL 4y agoJust look at the state of forests in those countries... Parts of unique national parks razed to the ground... Land owners just want to get rich ASAP everywhere.
- boc 4y agoI mean, the USSR’s state-run actions completely drained and destroyed one of the largest inland seas in the world. Public isn’t always the answer either. What really works for ocean policy is putting informed experts in charge of global regulations and everyone adhering to the rules under strict observation and penalties. It’s just really hard to get those institutions setup. There’s an opportunity to use the existing UNCLOS framework to establish rules around commercial fishing operations, but they’ve been stalled for years. Likely because China is the worst offender and currently disputes a lot of the rules around sea/ocean territory given their interests in their immediate maritime spaces.
- WalterBright 4y ago> wildlife is still being decimated Wildlife isn't owned by anybody. Contrast this with cows. Cows are in no danger of extinction, despite mass slaughter of them.
- vkou 4y ago
- hedora 4y agoAlso, coral reefs and kelp forests are suffering unprecedented losses.
- ROTMetro 4y agoImagine someone just flying a helicopter through a forest scraping up the wildlife in huge nets, picking out the snails, and dropping the rest of what they scooped up to their death. Yet it happens all day every in the oceans and no one cares. It used to be for every pound of wild caught shrimp caught, more than 4.5-5 pounds of other fish species were caught as bycatch and discarded dead. But now thanks to by catch reduction devices that is down up to 30%, so an optimistic 3.15-3.5 pound of bycatch.
- mr_toad 4y agoWe’ve already destroyed a third of Earths forests, and most grassland has been converted to agriculture. We didn’t use nets, but the result has been the same.
- drewm1980 4y agoI also feel that not building world-destroying robots should be something we should be able to reach consensus on. My current favorite world-destroying robot photo is from the battle of Lutzerath: https://i.redd.it/bonkanv0xiba1.jpg https://i.redd.it/bonkanv0xiba1.jpg If that photo doesn't cause people to wake up to what's being done, ostensibly on our behalf, I don't know what will.
- dcchambers 4y ago> 2.7 trillion fish are caught every year, or up to 5 million caught every minute. Bycatch aside, this number absolutely floors me. There is no way this number can sound remotely sustainable to anyone, right? I love seafood, but I know the issues with overfishing so I don't eat it often and when I do, I do my best to only eat sustainably caught or farmed fish...but I feel absolutely hopeless seeing numbers like this.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago> There is no way this number can sound remotely sustainable to anyone, right? Why not? How many fish are born every minute?
- cinntaile 4y agoOverfishing and dwindling fish populations are pretty established facts.
- thaumasiotes 4y agoWhat does that have to do with the number?
- cinntaile 4y agoI get that you wanted the original poster to realize that a big number doesn't necessarily mean anything. But we already know it's not sustainable.
- thaumasiotes 4y agoYou can either point at the number and say "Look at this number! Can't you just tell that it isn't sustainable?" or you can say "It doesn't matter what the number is, we know it's not sustainable for other reasons." But neither of those is a support for the other. If you start with the assumption that the number is unsustainable, you're not doing anything when you look at the number.