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Alaska snow crab season canceled after disappearance of an estimated 1B crabs

cbsnews.com

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Re: Alaska snow crab season canceled after disappearance of an estimated 1B crabs

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

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.

Re: Alaska snow crab season canceled after disappearance of an estimated 1B crabs

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like this article was written in 2008. I wonder if the population has rebounded in the last 15 years at all.

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.

Yep, came here to comment that same bit. So I'll contribute the link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_north...

Re: Alaska snow crab season canceled after disappearance of an estimated 1B crabs

#85

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.

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Re: Alaska snow crab season canceled after disappearance of an estimated 1B crabs

#86
post #4

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 prac…

Great song about it by Finest Kind (sadly not properly available online): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX6dJgmof0E

Re: Alaska snow crab season canceled after disappearance of an estimated 1B crabs

#87

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.

> 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...

Re: Alaska snow crab season canceled after disappearance of an estimated 1B crabs

#88
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. h…

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.

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.

Re: Alaska snow crab season canceled after disappearance of an estimated 1B crabs

#89
post #43
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> "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/http://articles.l...), p3

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