So if the population collapses, the fishermen will go out of business until the population recovers? Or is it not as simple as that?
A good overview of over-fishing and why it's urgent to halt it: https://vimeo.com/43888692
Popular seafood species in sharp decline around the world
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Re: Popular seafood species in sharp decline around the world
#22So if the population collapses, the fishermen will go out of business until the population recovers? Or is it not as simple as that?
When the population collapses, the species will go extinct.
Usually commercial exploitation becomes unviable before actual extinction occurs, although some species have been hunted to death for sport. You’d typically see this being a bigger problem for highly valued species like tuna where consumers are willing to pay premium prices for the remaining creatures, rather than more commodity species.
The bigger risk extinction wise isn’t that we’ll fish a species to death, it’s that we’ll leave it in such a rough state that any number of random events might finish the species off.
Re: Popular seafood species in sharp decline around the world
#23The tragedy of the commons writ large.
I hear Iceland and New Zealand have sustainable ownership based systems.
Re: Popular seafood species in sharp decline around the world
#24So if the population collapses, the fishermen will go out of business until the population recovers? Or is it not as simple as that?
Or the ecosystem arrives at a different, stable operating point.
Re: Popular seafood species in sharp decline around the world
#25So if the population collapses, the fishermen will go out of business until the population recovers? Or is it not as simple as that?
Not as simple, no.
1) There are consequences (economic and social) beyond what goes on our plate to "fishermen will go out of business". In many places, especially in underdeveloped areas, fishing is subsistence and the consequences of fisherman having to find alternative livelihoods can be problematic.[1] But even in the developed world, overfishing can have serious economic impact.[2]
2) There is no automatic guarantee that fish populations will recover, or recover quickly enough. While complete extinction is rare[3], some species have come close (several species of whales and sharks, for example) and can take decades to recover. In addition, destructive fishing techniques like bottom trawling can destroy the environment needed for a recovery. There is also some evidence (not, as I understand, conclusive) that in the absence of native fish, especially if their population is depressed for a long time, could allow less desirable species to displace them.[4]
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319680762_When_Over...
[2] https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/fact-shee...
[3] https://www.pnas.org/content/114/31/E6274
[4] https://www.sciencebuzz.com/jellyfish-apocalypse-problems-ca...
Re: Popular seafood species in sharp decline around the world
#26I really wish there was a way to stop all fishing at a commercial level for 10 years. Not that you can’t eat a fish just that if you want that luxury you have to go catch it yourself. I know this will never happen.
There is, but the duration might be longer than 10 years. We grab a bunch of what's endangered, sequence their genomes, construct plans for future repopulation, and be prepared for a future when we're more responsible with these natural resources. The fisheries will exhaust, and demand will shift elsewhere in the short term. There is no other path to success, as attempting cooperation with those who will fish relentl…
Organisms are so much more complex than their genome, in ways we're only now starting to understand:
> Human cells make up only 43% of the body's total cell count. The rest are microscopic colonists.
Re: Popular seafood species in sharp decline around the world
#27I really wish there was a way to stop all fishing at a commercial level for 10 years. Not that you can’t eat a fish just that if you want that luxury you have to go catch it yourself. I know this will never happen.
There is, but the duration might be longer than 10 years. We grab a bunch of what's endangered, sequence their genomes, construct plans for future repopulation, and be prepared for a future when we're more responsible with these natural resources. The fisheries will exhaust, and demand will shift elsewhere in the short term. There is no other path to success, as attempting cooperation with those who will fish relentl…
The problem there is that when the fish become extinct, the entire ecosystem is altered and may never recover.
Re: Popular seafood species in sharp decline around the world
#28We should be fixing farmed fish. When was the last time people ate wild cow. It's not sustainable for a population to be exploiting wild fish, farm properly and learn to do it quickly. As long as we eat meat, we have to do it in the least intrusive way.
Since cow are definitionally domesticated, nobody has ever eaten a wild cow, but people eat wild mammals on a regular basis.
Game is typically much healthier as a food source than domesticated animals; this includes wild-caught fish vs. farm-raised fish.
Re: Popular seafood species in sharp decline around the world
#29With the way the human population is expanding and the rising income of 3rd world nations we are really going to look at a major increase in both genetically engineering food stock to be larger and more nutritious as well as ramping up lab grown meat. Conservation is clearly not going to work as so many nations ignore it anyway and quite often regulations lack teeth due to the fear of killing an industry. Its difficu…
Yup. We're already pretty much at capacity in terms of using arable farming land[1]. We need more efficient farming, which means GMOs and advanced farming methods; we don't need less efficient farming like organic and anti-GMO.
[1] https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/how-much-arabl...