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400-year-old Greenland shark ‘longest-living vertebrate’ (2016)

bbc.com

111–113 of 113 posts

Re: 400-year-old Greenland shark ‘longest-living vertebrate’ (2016)

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>vote with your wallet as that is your power, use it, don't loose it. When you tell people to "vote with your wallet", you are implicitly admitting that people with bigger wallets have more votes. Literally millions of times more, in many cases. Don't vote with your wallet. involve yourself in local government, because legislation is the only way to solve problems like this.

> When you tell people to "vote with your wallet", you are implicitly admitting that people with bigger wallets have more votes. Seeing the world as it is, is a precondition to changing it. You don't have to like it, but you do have to understand it. In this case I both disagree and agree. Disagree: Yes, rich people have a lot more money. But they don't eat more food than anyone else. Their threat to not buy certain…

> Yes, rich people have a lot more money. But they don't eat more food than anyone else. Their threat to not buy certain fish is worth about as much as mine.

The issue is that rich people are both buying and supplying the fish that anyone else eventually eats.

You can do a bunch of research to figure out the best and most ethically sourced fish providers, but that takes a bunch of time and effort. It's not something you can reasonably rely on consumers to do. That's because most consumers either don't care or they care more about the absolute price than the source.

This comes up all the time with child labor and sweatshops. These big corporations have a giant supply network that makes it really hard to figure out where something comes from. Yes, maybe the shirt was sewn ethically but the cotton for the shirt was not. How would you know?

It's the same problem with fish. Unless there is a capital incentive (through regulation) to force a company to ethically source goods, they'll sooner turn a blind eye than fix the problem. That's because they know it's nearly impossible for an end consumer be informed about their ethics lapses.

So, while a rich person uninvolved with fisheries has little say in how their fish are sourced, rich people are most certainly in charge of which sources are ultimately used if they have fish in their supply chains. Those are the rich people with way more power than an individual consumer.

Re: 400-year-old Greenland shark ‘longest-living vertebrate’ (2016)

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does displaced mean? Why are terrestrial vertebrates preferred in this analysis? Why is the horizontal scale in that chart nonlinear? What is peakoilbarrel.com? The goalposts seem to have shifted from the person I replied to.

Returning to your original question, I answered that biomass is a more useful metric than strict census, as biomass gives an indication of net metabolism, energy throughput, carbon fixation capacity (for plants / primary producers), and tissue synthesis and maintenance (for animals / secondary+ consumers). It's denoted by population * mean bodyweight, and normalises measures across species with wildly differing bodyw…

Aha, so humans have reduced the diversity of species on the planet. That seems plausible to me (and even compatible with the original "reduced inhabitants" phrase that was used by the other poster earlier). Thanks for the all the information.

I wonder if we will be remembered by future biologists as cyanobacteria are remembered by our biologists today.

Re: 400-year-old Greenland shark ‘longest-living vertebrate’ (2016)

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first paid job was an internship at a research institute where I had to examine buckets of bycatch and count how many of various species had been caught. I think it was from shrimp fishing and the bycatch was just small fish (1 to 6 inches). For some fish, we would figure out their age by looking at some tiny bone pieces under a microscope and counting rings, similar to tree rings. I have no idea how I ended up in…

Did you have fun?

No, I hated it.
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