4 ms·

I would agree, but then I read the Wikipedia page which says that around 10 of these animals are caught every day as bycatch, so I assume the shark that was stu

I would agree, but then I read the Wikipedia page which says that around 10 of these animals are caught every day as bycatch, so I assume the shark that was studied came from one of these. This shark takes 150 years to reach sexual maturity and gestates for 8-18 years. It's pretty fucked up that bycatch at this rate is just accepted because it surely is going to lead the species to extinction. Humans are pretty fucking arrogant. If these sharks were not caught at this rate then I would agree that they shouldn't be studied in ways that require killing them, but since they are, I think it is better to at least get some knowledge out of it and possibly raise awareness of the problem. Edit: read the article, and it actually says it was caught by the scientists and not as bycatch. Still, this catch is negligible compared to the 3500 that are caught, killed and thrown out again (I assume) each year

andrewflnr 10mo ago
> The Greenland sharks used in her co-study were caught between 2020 and 2024 using scientific long lines off the coast of the University of Copenhagen's Arctic Station on Disko Island, Greenland. But I guess a few sharks for scientific sampling are probably still negligible compared to bycatch.
the-grump 10mo ago
People don't want to face the music but the way we're fishing is completely unsustainable. The way we live on land is unsustainable too, of course.
- tonyhart7 10mo ago
  so we need to extract resources from space asap, now that the planet cant sustain entire human race
  - prmoustache 10mo ago
    No, we need to reduce dramatically our own population.
    - zo1 10mo ago
      That sort of thinking needs to first and almost-entirely be directed at China, India and Africa, then we can talk about sustainability and what the West can do.
      - prmoustache 10mo ago
        The west is wasting much more resources and contributing to global warming more than these 3 continents/countries combined.
  - duskdozer 10mo ago
    now this guy's just a straight shooter with upper management written all over him.
    - tonyhart7 10mo ago
      [flagged]
      - prmoustache 10mo ago
        Poor countries have actually less impact on our planet than wealthy ones. There are many ways to handle population control, not only controlling natality. That wouldn't be popular but you could imagine a mandatory euthanasy at 55 or 60 for example.
        tonyhart7 10mo ago
        "Poor countries have actually less impact on our planet than wealthy ones." in the near future, richer countries would wage war againt "poor" country to take their water source this is what gonna happen, not if but when with the ever growing technology achievement and billions more people to come and desire to consume finite resources, what do you think gonna happen ????
  - maxbond 10mo ago
    Adding more resources doesn't solve the problem that they aren't being managed sustainably. We can't exhaust all the resources in space, but we could definitely exhaust all of the resources accessible to us in space. Like how we can't exhaust all of the oil or all of the gold on this planet, but we could exhaust all of the resource which can be mined economically. This was once explained to me with a metaphor of a bacteria colony in a jar. The colony doubles every 24 hours. So they quickly exhaust the space in the jar. No problem, you give them another jar. 24 hours later, their population doubles, and they have filled both jars.
    - tonyhart7 10mo ago
      Yes, it does
      - maxbond 10mo ago
        Would you care to elaborate?
        JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
        Resource intensity of GDP has been falling for decades, most quickly in developed economies. Space-based resource extraction isn’t going to be radically cheaper (if it ever is cheaper) than terrestrial sources with known propulsion, so that balance is unlikely to shift. Herego, replacing terrestrial extraction with moderately-cheaper space-based extraction would reduce harm to our ecosystem without changing our economies to turbo-consume materials and thereby accelerate terrestrial extraction.
        maxbond 10mo ago
        I agree it may reduce harm (depending on how the actual costs shake out), but the calculus remains that if you have access to finite resources but your needs are expanding exponentially, and you are not recycling them in some way, you will run out of resources no matter how many you have. I'm not opposed to exploiting resources in space, I think we should pursue the goal of being an "interplanetary species", but I think it's important to understand that it isn't a silver bullet or a free lunch. We still have to change our economy to be more sustainable. Not to mention that it is not clear that exploiting space resources or becoming interplanetary is possible. I presume that it is. But we shouldn't bank our future on something unproven. We don't know if we're a decade away from mining our first asteroid or a century. We should assume that our future is here on Earth with the resources currently available to us, until proven otherwise.
- srean 10mo ago
  There's a massive reduction in the whale song of the blue whales. Almost halved. They are presumably starving. That something ginormous can be so elegant, beautiful and sleek is hard to conceive till one meets a blue whale. Let's let them thrive on the blue planet.
  - derektank 10mo ago
    The Blue Whale population has actually increased since the 70s. When they were critically endangered, their population numbered roughly 1,000-2,000 but population estimates for today put the number at roughly tenfold that. The 1966 worldwide moratorium on whaling has been incredibly successful and we’ve also seen recoveries in Humpback and Grey Whales.
    - srean 10mo ago
      Compared to numbers at peak whaling you are correct. I was commenting on a more recent phenomena. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/ocean-heat-wave-blob-whale-songs https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/ocean-hea... http://archive.today/2025.09.03-030523/https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/ocean-heat-wave-blob-whale-songs http://archive.today/2025.09.03-030523/https://www.nationalg...
- hshdhdhj4444 10mo ago
  We keep talking about “sustainability” but sustainability is a secondary issue here. The primary issue is that we are taking individuals and basically torturing and/or killing them, rarely for good reasons. It won’t even be decades before our descendants look back at horror for how we treat them, not unlike how we can’t even imagine how our ancestors thought it was ok to have human slaves. The major difference will be that the horrors of human chattel slavery (even the name clearly links it to how we treat non human animals) have largely only been recorded via text. The horrors of our actions will be available in text, images, videos for all to see in perpetuity by just looking at an Instagram archive.
dataflow 10mo ago
Tangent, but you might want to watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tuS1LLOcsI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tuS1LLOcsI
alex1138 10mo ago
Douglas Adams had Last Chance To See and then the series got a reboot by Stephen Fry
gimmeThaBeet 10mo ago
jeez 8-18 years, is that a record or is it one of those things they don't know enough about them to narrow down? that's another thing to think about when my ignorant self is eating my sushi. i used to assume that farmed salmon was marginally better than wild, but given how much wild fish gets fed to farmed fish, not sure that is even a plus on top of the ecological effects of fish farming.

andrewflnr 10mo ago

> The Greenland sharks used in her co-study were caught between 2020 and 2024 using scientific long lines off the coast of the University of Copenhagen's Arctic Station on Disko Island, Greenland. But I guess a few sharks for scientific sampling are probably still negligible compared to bycatch.

the-grump 10mo ago

People don't want to face the music but the way we're fishing is completely unsustainable. The way we live on land is unsustainable too, of course.

tonyhart7 10mo ago
so we need to extract resources from space asap, now that the planet cant sustain entire human race
- prmoustache 10mo ago
  No, we need to reduce dramatically our own population.
  - zo1 10mo ago
    That sort of thinking needs to first and almost-entirely be directed at China, India and Africa, then we can talk about sustainability and what the West can do.
    - prmoustache 10mo ago
      The west is wasting much more resources and contributing to global warming more than these 3 continents/countries combined.
- duskdozer 10mo ago
  now this guy's just a straight shooter with upper management written all over him.
  - tonyhart7 10mo ago
    [flagged]
    - prmoustache 10mo ago
      Poor countries have actually less impact on our planet than wealthy ones. There are many ways to handle population control, not only controlling natality. That wouldn't be popular but you could imagine a mandatory euthanasy at 55 or 60 for example.
      - tonyhart7 10mo ago
        "Poor countries have actually less impact on our planet than wealthy ones." in the near future, richer countries would wage war againt "poor" country to take their water source this is what gonna happen, not if but when with the ever growing technology achievement and billions more people to come and desire to consume finite resources, what do you think gonna happen ????
- maxbond 10mo ago
  Adding more resources doesn't solve the problem that they aren't being managed sustainably. We can't exhaust all the resources in space, but we could definitely exhaust all of the resources accessible to us in space. Like how we can't exhaust all of the oil or all of the gold on this planet, but we could exhaust all of the resource which can be mined economically. This was once explained to me with a metaphor of a bacteria colony in a jar. The colony doubles every 24 hours. So they quickly exhaust the space in the jar. No problem, you give them another jar. 24 hours later, their population doubles, and they have filled both jars.
  - tonyhart7 10mo ago
    Yes, it does
    - maxbond 10mo ago
      Would you care to elaborate?
      - JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
        Resource intensity of GDP has been falling for decades, most quickly in developed economies. Space-based resource extraction isn’t going to be radically cheaper (if it ever is cheaper) than terrestrial sources with known propulsion, so that balance is unlikely to shift. Herego, replacing terrestrial extraction with moderately-cheaper space-based extraction would reduce harm to our ecosystem without changing our economies to turbo-consume materials and thereby accelerate terrestrial extraction.
        maxbond 10mo ago
        I agree it may reduce harm (depending on how the actual costs shake out), but the calculus remains that if you have access to finite resources but your needs are expanding exponentially, and you are not recycling them in some way, you will run out of resources no matter how many you have. I'm not opposed to exploiting resources in space, I think we should pursue the goal of being an "interplanetary species", but I think it's important to understand that it isn't a silver bullet or a free lunch. We still have to change our economy to be more sustainable. Not to mention that it is not clear that exploiting space resources or becoming interplanetary is possible. I presume that it is. But we shouldn't bank our future on something unproven. We don't know if we're a decade away from mining our first asteroid or a century. We should assume that our future is here on Earth with the resources currently available to us, until proven otherwise.
srean 10mo ago
There's a massive reduction in the whale song of the blue whales. Almost halved. They are presumably starving. That something ginormous can be so elegant, beautiful and sleek is hard to conceive till one meets a blue whale. Let's let them thrive on the blue planet.
- derektank 10mo ago
  The Blue Whale population has actually increased since the 70s. When they were critically endangered, their population numbered roughly 1,000-2,000 but population estimates for today put the number at roughly tenfold that. The 1966 worldwide moratorium on whaling has been incredibly successful and we’ve also seen recoveries in Humpback and Grey Whales.
  - srean 10mo ago
    Compared to numbers at peak whaling you are correct. I was commenting on a more recent phenomena. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/ocean-heat-wave-blob-whale-songs https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/ocean-hea... http://archive.today/2025.09.03-030523/https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/ocean-heat-wave-blob-whale-songs http://archive.today/2025.09.03-030523/https://www.nationalg...
hshdhdhj4444 10mo ago
We keep talking about “sustainability” but sustainability is a secondary issue here. The primary issue is that we are taking individuals and basically torturing and/or killing them, rarely for good reasons. It won’t even be decades before our descendants look back at horror for how we treat them, not unlike how we can’t even imagine how our ancestors thought it was ok to have human slaves. The major difference will be that the horrors of human chattel slavery (even the name clearly links it to how we treat non human animals) have largely only been recorded via text. The horrors of our actions will be available in text, images, videos for all to see in perpetuity by just looking at an Instagram archive.

dataflow 10mo ago

Tangent, but you might want to watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tuS1LLOcsI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tuS1LLOcsI

alex1138 10mo ago

Douglas Adams had Last Chance To See and then the series got a reboot by Stephen Fry

gimmeThaBeet 10mo ago

jeez 8-18 years, is that a record or is it one of those things they don't know enough about them to narrow down? that's another thing to think about when my ignorant self is eating my sushi. i used to assume that farmed salmon was marginally better than wild, but given how much wild fish gets fed to farmed fish, not sure that is even a plus on top of the ecological effects of fish farming.