[HN Gopher] Alaska snow crab season canceled after disappearance...
___________________________________________________________________
Alaska snow crab season canceled after disappearance of an
estimated 1B crabs
Author : ijidak
Score : 263 points
Date : 2022-10-14 18:49 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cbsnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cbsnews.com)
| pgrote wrote:
| The Seattle Times joined followed a carb boat in April of 2022.
|
| 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 wrote:
| > carb boat
|
| Heh heh. I imagine fishermen hauling in a net full of potatoes
| and pasta.
| 60secs wrote:
| A bread bowl with a propeller
| paxys wrote:
| "Disappearance" is a weird way to say overfishing. It's not like
| someone cast a spell or something.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| They 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.
| ilamont wrote:
| Something 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
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| starik36 wrote:
| Looks like this article was written in 2008. I wonder if the
| population has rebounded in the last 15 years at all.
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| Wikipedia says its not expected to recover to sustainable
| levels until 2030. Mind that they take 2-8 years to reach
| sexual maturity and were reduced to 1% of original population
| level, so a span of decades to recover is pretty sadly
| expected.
| gcanyon wrote:
| Yep, came here to comment that same bit. So I'll contribute
| the link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atl
| antic_north...
| starik36 wrote:
| That is one grim Wikipedia article.
| tromp wrote:
| > to prevent economic losses and massive unemployment
|
| So sad to see how easily long term catastrophic damage is
| justified by short term gains.
| jjr8 wrote:
| Climate change (warming waters) has been directly implicated in
| this (edit: Gulf of Maine cod) situation.
|
| https://doi.org/10.1126%2Fscience.aac9819
| dfc wrote:
| How is a 90% decrease in two years similar to a 93% decrease
| over 30 years?
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| Top 2 comments are like "oh yeah this is over fishing" when
| the only thing in common with cod are that they're in the
| ocean.
|
| Either folks aren't RTFA or are being willfully ignorant.
| Over fishing to the tune 1bn crabs when juvenile populations
| from 2018 and 2019 looked great? No way.
| beefman wrote:
| Great song about it by Finest Kind (sadly not properly
| available online): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX6dJgmof0E
| uxp100 wrote:
| Interesting what is and isn't available. Because I clicked
| this link to see not recognizing the name Finest Kind and was
| like, oh they play that on the folk program pretty often, I
| know that song.
| xutopia wrote:
| The 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.
| whyenot wrote:
| No, it's not that simple. The snow crab fishery is pretty
| highly regulated and considered to be sustainably harvested (by
| NOAA, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, others). As mentioned in an
| another article [1] from August on the recent disappearance,
| there were large numbers of juveniles in 2018 and 2019.
| Something else is going on. Overfishing certainly may play a
| role, but something else is likely the primary factor.
|
| 1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/21/alaska-
| cr...
| WalterBright wrote:
| Wildlife populations are a chaotic system, i.e. not steady
| state, even without any influence by humans.
|
| It's still worth investigating, however.
| aaron695 wrote:
| barkingcat wrote:
| https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/2021/10/09/alaska-snow-
| crab-...
|
| Notice that this article is from 2021 for last year's catch.
|
| "The 2021 fall harvest of Bristol Bay red king crab, another
| important source of revenue for that fleet, was canceled for
| this year because of too few females."
|
| The collapse has been happening for years. This year it's
| just another species. Species by species it's going to
| collapse. Next will be shrimp and krill.
|
| Don't be surprised when the salmon runs collapse too, because
| for 3 years now every single year has been a 90% decline.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > considered to be sustainably harvested (by NOAA, the
| Monterey Bay Aquarium, others)
|
| maybe they considered incorrectly, based on historical data
| that doesn't reflect recent conditions
|
| also possibly that regulations are being flaunted by bad
| actors
|
| it could seem improbable that either of those would lead to a
| sudden catastrophic decline, but many systems do experience a
| point where what had been a linear decline suddenly craters
| in a non-linear fashion
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| In previous collapses such organizations sounded the alarm
| well before. Something else is happening.
| barkingcat wrote:
| https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/2021/10/09/alaska-snow-
| crab-...
|
| The alarm has been sounding for at least a season, maybe
| even more.
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| By contrast cod that folks keep referencing collapsed 90%
| over _30 years_. An issue with a single season does not
| suggest that the regulations weren't strict enough. They
| now do need to become more strict as a reaction to the
| population but fishing is not the only pressure on a
| population and I find it difficult to believe that snow
| crab would be fished basically to extinction in < 700
| days
| hedgehog wrote:
| I don't know much about snow crab but Dungeness and various
| oysters in the Pacific Northwest US are threatened by rising
| ocean acidity caused by increased CO2. Warmer water is also
| allowing green crabs to take hold. Farther south urchins have
| killed off a lot of kelp forest in a way that seems not to
| self-correct. Easy to imagine there are similar problems all
| over the ocean.
| soperj wrote:
| Sea urchins are a problem everywhere in the pacific, and
| that's because their main predator (sea otters) were nearly
| wiped out.
| swhalen wrote:
| I think it's just the western coast of North America that
| has this problem, rather than the entire Pacific. For
| example in New Zealand, which is in the Pacific, there
| were never any sea otters. Urchins, regarded locally as a
| delicacy, are not particularly abundant.
| greggsy wrote:
| Crown-of-thorns starfish, on the other hand, are a very
| serious problem in Australia
| kfrzcode wrote:
| Things that are easy to imagine aren't always easy to prove
| rileyphone wrote:
| At least the urchin problem is caused, in part, by the
| mysterious sea star wasting disease - a disbiosis of their
| microbial layer that leads to rapid death. Sea stars are
| the natural predators of the urchins, and with their
| disappearance, the urchins flourish and take down the kelp.
| steelframe wrote:
| > Sea stars are the natural predators of the urchins, and
| with their disappearance, the urchins flourish and take
| down the kelp.
|
| No problem. We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese
| needle snakes. They'll wipe out the the urchins.
| marcjuul wrote:
| Absolutely not an expert here and would love to be corrected
| but my poorly informed personal impression is that the whole
| idea of a sustainable amount of fishing and whether all
| species even have a number that is safe to harvest
| (especially given that no species exists in isolation), let
| alone what that number is, is on fairly shaky grounds
| scientifically. Meaning that a lot of this is guesswork based
| on too little information and "doing something is better than
| doing nothing" compromises with the fishing industry. If a
| species population has appeared to be stable for x number of
| years with y amount of fishing, does that mean that it's
| sustainable? Indefinitely? Given other changes in ecosystem
| and environment?
| colordrops wrote:
| Thank you. The problem with a lot of the discussion around
| this topic is that most people are heavily biased as they
| derive great pleasure from consuming these animals, and so
| certain ideas and theories are ignored or under
| represented.
| mattpallissard wrote:
| Nothing with fisheries is simple.
|
| https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/preliminary-sur...
|
| Also, a lot of people are comparing this to the Canadian DFO's
| handling of the Cod fishery. Sorry, this is not like that. Both
| in time line and management style. This fishery was just shut
| down, it's had its numbers slashed previously as well. In the
| Cod situation they had their foot in the accelerator until the
| very end.
| melling wrote:
| Yes, "the climate is always changing"
|
| Those "alarmist".
|
| People certainly do blame climate change when they shouldn't,
| adding to the denial problem.
|
| But in this case 90% disappearing in 2 years probably isn't
| overfishing.
| chaxor wrote:
| This likely isn't true due to the scale of disappearance of
| crabs.
|
| *90% of the are gone - in only 2 years* That's not just
| overfishing, something much worse has happened.
|
| The cod overfishing was also a very unfortunate tale, but they
| saw the signs and tracked them catching fire and burning to the
| ground the entire time, just didn't do anything about it.
|
| Here, AFAIK, they were bewildered at how this occured.
| jobu wrote:
| Other sources I've seen are blaming the dramatic heat during
| the summer of 2019. It "scrambled the broader marine
| ecosystem" causing die-offs and migrations for many species
| of fish. Snow Crabs are primarily deep water scavengers so
| they had plenty of food that year, but have struggled since.
| taylodl wrote:
| Some people don't want to hear that because it's counter to
| their world-view. Earth isn't warming. Everything is OK. We
| can continue burning fossil fuels while having zero impact
| to the environment. Is there a word describing this mass
| wishful thinking?
| bwb wrote:
| revscat wrote:
| > Is there a word describing this mass wishful thinking?
|
| An existential threat to all human life.
| Tagbert wrote:
| That mass wishful thinking is call "climate change
| denial".
|
| We keep adding more and more evidence that climate change
| is happening. Even on a local scale we can all see
| significant changes in our local climate from year to
| year. The older among us can see this even more clearly
| if they chose. From what we know of the atmosphere there
| HAS to be heating from the rapid increase in CO2.
|
| You can stick your fingers in your ears as much as you
| want but it won't prevent this from happening and at an
| accelerating pace.
| peyton wrote:
| Also the solutions being pushed kind of suck for most
| people. We've had 50 years of sustainability and eco-
| asceticism. Denial is a perfectly fine reaction to the
| solutions being proposed.
| hedora wrote:
| A dollar a gallon tax on gasoline would be more than
| enough to capture the CO2 it releases.
|
| Other energy sources are similar.
|
| These costs are way below what happens when some oil
| producer throws a tantrum or starts a war. However,
| unlike wars, etc., such a tax would directly cut into oil
| company profits.
| qorrect wrote:
| Your crazy if you think the government isn't going to
| just piss that money away. Its already at ~$.50 a gallon
| with federal and state taxes. And the oil companies will
| just stop producing to lower supply and inflate the
| price. More taxes are going to hurt the individual ,
| companies have enough money to get around it. No, we need
| a revolution.
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| The same people who get pumped up by football games and
| tailgaters, war epics, and 'badassery' and doing stupid
| but 'brave' things like shooting fireworks out your ass,
| are the same people who will deny anything that's 'too
| scary' not to.
|
| Or attribute it to "God's will" and then still assume
| he'll take care of things so they can just go on ignoring
| the issues.
|
| Reminds me of the cowardly lion who could talk a big
| game,but was inwardly afraid of everything. Even
| xenophobia and racism --it's ALL rooted in fear of
| 'others' fear of this. Politicians know damn well the
| power of fear, and have used it w/ great success to stay
| in power and keep left/right workers divided on stuff
| like abortion/gun rights.
| [deleted]
| oesexe wrote:
| COD, 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 wrote:
| Many 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.
| nickfromseattle wrote:
| Here 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/
| b...
| wahern wrote:
| > "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-
| ocean30j... (https://web.archive.org/web/20161010003945/htt
| p://articles.l...), p3
| guywithahat wrote:
| I 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.
| taylodl wrote:
| Global warming also contributes to the proliferation of
| disease.
| Daishiman wrote:
| chasd00 wrote:
| nharada wrote:
| "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?
| boxmonster wrote:
| This was predicted in Horx Myxln's groundbreaking book
| "Crabitalism"
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| I can't tell if you're being sarcastic but with this name I
| hope you are because it's hilarious.
| boxmonster wrote:
| I'm joking but I expected to get [dead] so it's nice to see
| HN has a sense of humor sometimes!
| advantager wrote:
| https://imgur.com/855O98r
| [deleted]
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| It's a parody cover. That twitter account is hilarious: https
| ://twitter.com/paprbckparadise/status/12512693961120931...
| masklinn wrote:
| Alternatively, the antagonists of much of Neal Asher's
| polity series are spacefaring crustaceans.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Overfishing 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.
| hayst4ck wrote:
| I have large cognitive dissonance to "we shouldn't be the world
| police" and "globalism is bad." At face value I agree, but...
|
| If you believe in the rule of law and human rights, then
| globalism seems like a natural consequence, as does policing
| the world.
|
| What would happen if you let China have global hegemony and
| they become the over-fishing police? What type of enforcement
| do you think they might have (or non enforcement, or selective
| enforcement).
|
| It seems clear with world scale commons, there must be both a
| common set of laws (globalization) and an entity capable of
| enforcing those laws (America is the world police).
| myshpa wrote:
| Veganism is the (only logical) future.
| Luc wrote:
| Or meat and fish from bio reactors.
| Spivak wrote:
| The 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.
| revscat wrote:
| Which will likely involve not raising animals for slaughter
| at all, but rather things like Impossible/Beyond meats.
| hedora wrote:
| Impossible/beyond apparently have similar CO2 footprints
| as turkey.
|
| On the other hand, we're in the middle of a turkey
| shortage due to bird flu.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| I don't think those will really ever make a noticeable
| dent in the market. Most people don't want plant based
| burgers, especially with the negative reputation of soy
| and masculinity. I think lab grown meat will be the
| future. If you are able to present it in packages that
| look exactly like the cuts that one can currently buy in
| the store I see no reason they wont catch on.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| These have flopped. Most people who like meat want real
| meat. Most people who don't like meat don't want fake
| meat. The remainder is the market for fake meats, and it
| has proven small.
| LegitShady wrote:
| they flopped because they're expensive. I've tried both.
| They're both more or less edible. But impossible burgers
| are more money than just buying beef, and not as good.
| Why is this pea protein more money than beef?
| virgildotcodes wrote:
| The concept of "reasonably torturous" is pretty wild.
| hayst4ck wrote:
| Quite literally wild. There is nothing quite like
| watching David Attenborough walking us through the
| absolute ruthlessness of the animal kingdom in his plummy
| staccato voicing. There is no doubt that had cows evolved
| differently they would be as torturous to their prey as
| any other animal.
|
| I think we can definitely do better, but I think it's
| equally clear that mother nature is not very opinionated
| on the topic.
| virgildotcodes wrote:
| This is an appeal to nature fallacy.[1]
|
| Every horrifying thing beyond imagination has happened in
| nature, including all sorts of rape, murder, and
| infanticide.
|
| Does this justify humans in engaging in rape, murder, and
| infanticide?
|
| This is a discussion of morality, not what nature allows
| (which is everything possible within the laws of
| physics).
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| I mean... compared to other animals, of which some don't
| even kill you, before they start eating you... we're
| still better than a lot of "nature".
| virgildotcodes wrote:
| The thing is, there are a lot of horrible ways that
| people die. Cancer, alzheimer's, violence, crippling
| injuries, chronic pain and depression leading to suicide,
| war, etc. etc.
|
| Does this justify us enslaving people and torturing them
| (debatedly) less in a factory farm and slaughtering them
| at a young age?
| chrisfrantz wrote:
| Agreed, if you have to include the word torture in the
| descriptor of food production than there's already an
| ethical problem to solve.
| hayst4ck wrote:
| What 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.
| ijidak wrote:
| > Overfishing 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.
|
| That's a great point.
|
| So true...
|
| It's hard to get people to care enough to do anything about it
| until enough people are affected.
|
| Which is no fun for the sea life and poorer humans waiting for
| things to get bad enough that sufficient action is taken.
| klyrs wrote:
| Disease like CWD and avian flu can result in massive culls of
| farmed animals. High density animal farming bears risk of
| epidemics, and fish farming is no exception. As with most
| things in life, there are no easy answers.
| gmd63 wrote:
| Bubbles don't just happen in finance. They happen in biology.
| jeffbee wrote:
| "U.S. wild-caught Alaska snow crab is a smart seafood choice
| because it is sustainably managed and responsibly harvested under
| U.S. regulations."
|
| -NOAA Fisheries
|
| Humans have never practiced truly sustainable fishing at any time
| or place in history. Just do not buy fish.
| tylersmith wrote:
| If humans don't buy them they have no value and may as well be
| extinct anyways.
| troutwine wrote:
| What a horrifying worldview.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| It really is. I will never understand the "i got mine"
| attitude. I'm no angel, but holy shit.
| bombcar wrote:
| What about farmed trout? https://www.clearsprings.com
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| According 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 wrote:
| > 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
|
| So I guess they harvest wild fish to feed the farmed fish?
| mickdeek86 wrote:
| Fishmeal and oil are byproducts of processing the filets
| bombcar wrote:
| They 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.
| andrew_ wrote:
| As a fisherman who practices sustainable fishing and abides by
| the regulations in place, and has witnessed the rebound of
| several species I target, I call bullshit.
| jeffbee wrote:
| If the regulations lead to a complete disappearance of the
| fishery then they are definitionally unsustainable.
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| How are you able to implicate the regulations here
| directly? The fishery collapsed 90% in 2 years, something
| else is at play.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| By 'rebound' do you mean slightly above such catastrophic
| depletion that action was finally taken? Kind of a low
| baseline.
| naikrovek wrote:
| it's crazy how you think you know more about this than the
| person who wrote the comment you replied to.
| [deleted]
| ok_dad wrote:
| > Humans have never practiced truly sustainable fishing at any
| time or place in history.
|
| Oh shit, something I know about!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DqH2DPSw4g
|
| Yea, people have actually done this sustainably.
| kodah wrote:
| Apparently the definition of "sustainable" comes from the
| United Nations, not NOAA:
| https://ocean.si.edu/conservation/fishing/sustainable-fishin...
|
| They also disagree with you that they've _never_ been
| sustainably fished.
| squidfood wrote:
| The problem is that "sustainable" is always based on past
| observations. There were 40+ years of observations for these
| crab and a stable fishery. But if the environment changes for
| the worse, the data-based definition of "sustainable" for a
| stock might not change fast enough to compensate.
|
| So the "new sustainability" under climate change has to be
| much more precautionary than before, and yet not shut down on
| false signals. It's tricky science even when intentions are
| good.
| kodah wrote:
| Agreed, just making lucid the details of this argument.
| It's easy to take away from what you said that we haven't
| even tried.
| inopinatus wrote:
| Are you suggesting a low crab diet?
| felix_n wrote:
| Too soon!
| carapace wrote:
| Check out Dana (Donella) Meadows Lecture: Sustainable Systems
| (Part 2 of 4) - 2013
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuIoego-xVc
| mcwone wrote:
| Thank you for posting this, what an amazing lecture.
| mattw2121 wrote:
| King 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.
| reaperducer wrote:
| There 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.
| cluoma wrote:
| At 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.
| harveywi wrote:
| Possibly the same estimated 1B crabs that disappeared from
| Twitter when the Elon Musk deal was announced.
| ijidak wrote:
| werdnapk wrote:
| Earth 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.
| DesiLurker wrote:
| No 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.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| > observable metric
|
| By who though? Our entire existence could very well be a
| tree falling in an empty forest.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| By whoever is making the footnotes.
| MisterSandman wrote:
| Citation 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.
| voisin wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| From 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 wrote:
| Please don't cross into personal attack.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| Meh, our ability to change the earth grows every year sooner or
| later we'll fix it.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| And in so doing we'll end up breaking something else
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Someday, _maybe_ we 'll be able to bring back well-known
| extinct species like passenger pigeons where biological
| material may still exist in a museum somewhere. We're _never_
| going to bring back the thousands of arthropod species that
| have gone extinct since the industrial revolution[1] - many
| of which we never knew about in the first place.
|
| [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000632
| 071...
|
| > However, it is likely that insect extinctions since the
| industrial era are around 5 to 10%, i.e. 250,000 to 500,000
| species, based on estimates of 7% extinctions for land snails
| (Regnier et al., 2015). In total at least one million species
| are facing extinction in the coming decades, half of them
| being insects (IPBES, 2019).
| nyc_data_geek1 wrote:
| Citation needed
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| That 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I think (s)he was referring part about how we'll
| "definitely" know how to fix it before it's too late.
| masklinn wrote:
| > (s)he
|
| English has a perfectly cromulent singular neutral, no
| need for that.
| irrational wrote:
| But, 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 wrote:
| Not _always_. We mostly fixed the ozone hole. Acid rain
| is largely gone from North America. Rivers in much of the
| world are much cleaner than they were in the last half of
| the 20th century. Air quality has likewise improved in
| many places.
|
| I think that as areas achieve a certain level of plenty,
| their focus shifts from shorter-term thinking to longer-
| term thinking. And most places around the world are
| reaching that tipping point.
| nyc_data_geek1 wrote:
| let me know when we figure out how to reverse mass
| extinction
| outworlder wrote:
| > Meh, our ability to change the earth grows every year
| sooner or later we'll fix it.
|
| You are talking about geoengineering.
|
| It would be way better not to have to do such things in the
| first place. This is like "meh, sooner or later we'll be able
| to grow entire organs, you can keep smoking". Sure. But is
| that day coming soon enough? And what are the drawbacks of
| such a large intervention?
|
| Besides, species are going extinct every day. We can't get
| them back.
| _Adam wrote:
| We'll fix it till it's broke!
| masklinn wrote:
| We'll break it till it's fixed! Bearings will continue
| until morale improves! Breakfast and move things!
| tremon wrote:
| It's not a question of sooner or later. The only remaining
| options are late or too late.
| toss1 wrote:
| NO
|
| Our ability to change the earth grows every year
|
| Technologically, we get closer to the ability to fix it.
|
| BUT the fact that this kind of collapse keeps re-occurring
| means that humans are turning out to be collectively too
| stupid to actually fix such things until after a disaster
| happens.
|
| The Tragedy Of The Commons has been known about for
| centuries. Yet it keeps happening again, and again, and
| again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again,
| and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and
| again, and again, [ . . . ] etc., including in this very
| instance.
|
| All humans need to do is adjust to the reality. Yet the fact
| that some of the adjustments will mean that some of the
| people will need to change how they make a living, causes too
| many humans to argue vociferously that the change will be
| delayed. Humans even start wars over this kind of stupidity.
| And then, THE EARTH SYSTEM COLLAPSES, and forces everyone to
| make the change.
|
| The only question now is how big a disaster will happen and
| how recoverable it is. If we are lucky, the disaster will be
| just in the sweet spot of [bad enough to force the stupid
| mass of humanity to change it's ways], but not quite [bad
| enough that it cannot be recovered once those ways are
| changed].
| outworlder wrote:
| > 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.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| Most 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.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| darth_avocado wrote:
| I 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.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| If there were enough boats out there to reduce the population
| 90% in two years then we would know. Our radar isn't -that-
| bad.
| krastanov wrote:
| But 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-c...
| ROTMetro wrote:
| I 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.)
| pphysch wrote:
| Or 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 wrote:
| Do 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.
| vnchr wrote:
| Is it xenophobic when your own comment cites that exact
| behavior?
| logicalmonster wrote:
| Why are you assuming that the poster is hinting at China when
| his comment didn't mention the country?
| dmix wrote:
| Portuguese fisherman were the big thing off the coast of
| Canada. Definitely not unique to China, although they seem
| to use fishing boats as a political tool like Russia uses
| little green men. But that's closer to their shores.
| vore wrote:
| Tell me what other country the OP could possibly mean when
| they said "countries I dare not to list for being
| downvoted".
| logicalmonster wrote:
| China seems like a logical guess, but that statement
| could describe Israel or other countries that have very
| passionate supporters as well.
| josegonzalez wrote:
| I don't think it could mean Israel given that we're
| talking about the Bering Strait and not the Mediterranean
| or Red Sea.
| outworlder wrote:
| If the shoe fits...
| woodruffw wrote:
| China has been the subject of multiple high-profile news
| stories (and popular HN threads) about overfishing. They're
| also the standard xenophobic bugbear on HN.
| jjk166 wrote:
| How many states are there with access to pacific waters
| that could potentially have thousands of unregistered
| fishing vessels and whom a poster would be uncomfortable
| naming explicitly for fear of backlash?
| logicalmonster wrote:
| Seems odd that this is a logical guess, but then that's
| labelled as "xenophobic speculation".
| jjk166 wrote:
| It's a logical guess that the only country that could
| have thousands of unregistered ships would be china, one
| of the worlds leading industrial powers with a large
| pacific coastline. It's xenophobic speculation that china
| does in fact have these ships and specifically are the
| cause of this population collapsing.
| NSMutableSet wrote:
| Japan's pacific coastline is twice as large as China's.
| Your logic here is extremely faulty.
| samatman wrote:
| This is widely known, just not to you.
|
| Calling names won't change that.
| virgildotcodes wrote:
| It's kind of an obvious dog whistle, come on.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| China is by far overfishing all over the world compared to
| other countries. I doubt the Alaskan crabs are a result of
| that though.
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/aug/25/can-
| anyo...
| Supermancho wrote:
| > They over fish and destroy entire ecosystems and no one is
| doing anything about it.
|
| That's not just hyperbole, it's flat wrong. Some organizations
| _try_ to do things about it, even if the methodologies have
| historically been ineffective. Nobody would be able to
| completely solve it, while the Oceans are still largely
| uncontrolled.
|
| https://www.canada.ca/en/fisheries-oceans/news/2022/06/gover...
| raydiatian wrote:
| Cthulhu
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| I just assume Douglas Adams got it wrong and it's the crabs
| that left instead of the dolphins =P
| raydiatian wrote:
| "So long, and thanks for all the detritus"
| melony wrote:
| They had their neurons uploaded into Slavic machine learning
| systems. Stross wants his lobsters back!
| cmsj wrote:
| Maybe it was the crab rapture?
| djmips wrote:
| "Hope and pray." - yeah that'll solve it!
| wonderwonder wrote:
| a 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| If I was prez, I'd reserve a number of offshore "national parks"
| where no fishing of any sort is allowed.
| underbluewaters wrote:
| Search "Marine Protected Areas", they are definitely a thing.
| US Presidents also have a habit of designating Marine Monuments
| as they exit office.
| twawaaay wrote:
| You know, the difference is that marine animals travel a lot
| more than land animals.
| wiredfool wrote:
| Oddly 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.
| lcfcjs wrote:
| jcynix wrote:
| Overfishing? 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-hi...
| glonq wrote:
| Next season on Discovery's Deadliest Catch:
|
| Sig and Wild Bill learn how to knit.
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| At 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.
| tzs wrote:
| Sig went to fish in Norway, and Discovery is covering that [1].
|
| [1] https://www.discovery.com/shows/deadliest-catch-the-
| viking-r...
| outworlder wrote:
| How 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 wrote:
| No 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.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Interestingly, 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 wrote:
| Yeah 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 wrote:
| Meat 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.
| shagie wrote:
| It's possible.
|
| Searching suggests it is done more in SE Asia than in the US
| (this might be a "what does the cuisine focus on?")
|
| RAS Vertical Farming for Mud Crabs -
| https://youtu.be/XQJmZz4mdWY (there's a bit of an accent, I'd
| recommend subtitles)
|
| I'll also suggest a watch of How America's Biggest Indoor
| Shrimp Farm Sells 2 Million Shrimp Every Year -
| https://youtu.be/1AK_RQ1uaGs (the American diet tends to have
| more shrimp than crab). And for crawfish (not indoor)
| https://youtu.be/_bggaA5AURA
| opportune wrote:
| I did a decent amount of research into this a while back. They
| (blue crabs) can be grown in captivity, but they're
| cannabalistic, so they have to be kept apart from each other.
| This makes it pretty inefficient and high overhead. The crab
| farming operations I've seen literally have each crab in its
| own little compartment - this is too labor intensive to be
| feasible outside of places with very low wages like the
| Philippines and Indonesia.
|
| If someone can figure out how to keep crabs in large pens
| without them eating each other, they will make a lot of money.
| I'm not sure if that's possible with selective breeding. Maybe
| we need to wait until crab legs can be "printed" or grown in a
| lab
| TheGigaChad wrote:
| washedup wrote:
| Wow, those are some crazy numbers. Shocking it could happen that
| fast... what's next?
| whymauri wrote:
| I'm eating as much delicious sushi grade tuna I can before it's
| gone.
| tsol wrote:
| It's already full of plastic and mercury, so still might not
| be a great idea
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _It 's already full of plastic_
|
| So are you, and everybody else that has synthetic textiles
| in their house.
| c0nducktr wrote:
| What's one more drop of poison, right?
| Damogran6 wrote:
| You and everybody else. That's the problem.
| whymauri wrote:
| There 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.
| virgildotcodes wrote:
| Changing the industry overnight isn't in any one person's
| power any more than electing the next president, but the
| sum of our collective votes does decide the victor.
|
| Large scale boycotts of the industry will drop demand,
| and so production, and finally the impact on the
| fisheries.
|
| You can already see this at work with the decline of the
| milk industry in the US as consumers have lowered their
| consumption by about 49% since 1970.[1]
|
| All done by the power of consumer choice.
|
| Millions of people are already voluntarily choosing to
| engage in these boycotts against these destructive
| industries, without waiting to have a gun put to their
| heads. It's worth considering taking part in order to
| have some positive impact on the world, while also
| continuing to push for systemic change, in my opinion. It
| doesn't have to be either/or.
|
| [1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2022/june/fluid-
| milk-co...
| mickdeek86 wrote:
| That's talking about people _drinking_ milk or milk with
| cereal. Overall dairy consumption has increased ~20% over
| the same time period, mostly due to cheese and yogurt[0].
|
| Changing the industry is not in _one_ person 's power,
| but it is a small number of people (owners of the several
| large producers and the regulatory guys) who do change
| it; this (overnight) cancelling of the season is a
| counterexample to your point.
|
| https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/dairy-data/
| checker wrote:
| Creating 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 wrote:
| Enforcement 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.
| 83 wrote:
| >> Enforcement is a solved problem >> The issue is
| getting everyone to enforce the policies
|
| Doesn't seem solved to me. Look at the trouble south
| america has been having with chinese trawlers doing
| illegal fishing and sending it back to china.
| hedora wrote:
| Enforcement is far from a solved problem. For one thing,
| many fishing boats are still using slave labor.
|
| I agree the technology exists, but there's no way the
| governments in those areas are going to enforce any sort
| of laws that hurt short term profits.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| what a great way to look at life.
| ynx wrote:
| oh, c'mon!
|
| We don't have supervillains trying to destroy the world, all
| we need is rational people thinking like this to do it for
| us.
| wnevets wrote:
| tragedy of the commons in action
| DesiLurker wrote:
| Yup, as I always say, Tragedy of the commons will turn out
| to be our great filter.
| inopinatus wrote:
| irrational wrote:
| Well, 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 wrote:
| Sure 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 wrote:
| > "billions who subsist on seafood will now have to eat eggs,
| pork, beef"
|
| There is another possible outcome... :/
| suzzer99 wrote:
| Did anyone else read this is 18 crabs and wonder what the heck
| was going on?
| celestialcheese wrote:
| This 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
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