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Oceans Empty By 2048?
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat Nov 04, 2006 12:23 AM
from the dang-i-liked-fish dept.
from the dang-i-liked-fish dept.
F34nor writes to mention a CBS news article about the depopulation of ocean species. According to a study by a scientist in Halifax, Nova Scotia and assisted by research from all around the world, the world's oceans will be emptied of large lifeforms by 2048. From the article: "Already, 29% of edible fish and seafood species have declined by 90% — a drop that means the collapse of these fisheries. But the issue isn't just having seafood on our plates. Ocean species filter toxins from the water. They protect shorelines. And they reduce the risks of algae blooms such as the red tide. 'A large and increasing proportion of our population lives close to the coast; thus the loss of services such as flood control and waste detoxification can have disastrous consequences,' Worm and colleagues say."
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The De-Evolution of the Ocean 290 comments
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Harrumph (Score:2, Funny)
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No whale! It canned be true! They didn't just trawl this up, you know!
Re:Harrumph (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Every bit helps (Score:3, Informative)
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Tell that to the Japanese [abc.net.au]
Core Problem: Human Over-population (Score:4, Interesting)
Buying farm-raised fish is not the answer. To raise such fish, the farmers harvest other fish from the oceans in order to feed the fish on the farms. The end result is still the depletion of the wildlife in the oceans.
The only and correct solution is to stop growing the human population. However, no one wants to talk about over-population because talking about it usually elicits accusations of "bigot" or "racist".
The political mantra in the USA is that growing the population is wonderful. Both the "Wall Street Journal" (WSJ) and the "New York Times" (NYT) supports it. Both the WSJ and the NYT argue that unfettered immigration enriches everyone; talk about over-population runs contrary to unfettered immigration.
Over-population reminds me of global warming. Both are very serious problems, yet most people just do not feel the immediacy and seriousness of these problems. So, they hesitate to do anything that is substantive in fixing these problems -- until the day that the huge calamity (i.e. famine or environmental disaster) hits.
Parent
They seem to be forgetting something... (Score:2, Insightful)
Higher Price = Less Demand
Less Demand = Fish Population Increases
If a can of tuna went for $300 dollars because of a tuna shortage, I bet a lot of people would start cutting back on their tuna consumption.
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That depends. Can the "fishing industry" make decisions regarding it's furthered survival? It can't if it's run Laissez-Faire style. In such a case, if you decide to hold off on overfishing, someone else will just take your place. In non-regulated capitalism, doing the *right* thing is often also the *stupid* thing.
On the other hand, if there's a strong, viable international body which oversees and regulates the fishing industry--and I
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Ecosystems don't work that way. Fish need a certain population density to breed properly. They don't use singles bars like us humans.
The linear relationship you assume exists...doesn't.
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You can only depopulate a species so much before their chances of survival as a speicies (even after you stop farming them) goes down. There has to be enough of them to create stable populations, find mates, and produce enough new young to continue the population.
Do we know how close any of these species tipping point towards extinction is to the price point where demand drops low enough for them to recover?
My guess is that would be a very hard question to answer.
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It doesn't always work that way. For example, real caviar is so expensive that only very few people can afford it, yet many types of sturgeon are endangered, and we have to resort to other means (such as aquaculture [wikipedia.org]) to keep the species from becoming extinct. What I'm tr
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If tuna went for $300/can, it would be even more aggressively fished, not less.
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Try looking at it this way. With tuna at $300/can, the market for it is people who (1) can afford $300 for a can of food and (2) think tuna is the best way to spend the $300. A small fishing fleet would suffice to serve that kind of niche market.
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If tuna fisherman could get $300 for every can of tuna they sold, I bet they'd be a lot more motivated to catch every last tuna they could find. How much do you suppose the last tuna on Earth (ever!) would sell for?
If I were an investor (Score:2)
If we can build massive floating factories that sweep away the sea life, then maybe, just maybe, we can build ships to clear out toxins and drive back the red tide of algea. It seems like that's about our only hope.
We wanted to control our environment and Nature said: "Good, then you can do this stuff too! How about balancing ocean life? Would you like to maintain a protective ozone, too?" So far, our answer ha
Only one response to this... (Score:2)
By 2048 (Score:2)
Ok then... (Score:2)
It's so self-evident (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's so self-evident (Score:5, Informative)
the wastes produced by farming
the fish that escape
the diseases and parasites that occur in farms
the chemicals used to treat diseased fish
the problems of stock depletion and contamination of feed.
See:
http://www.focs.ca/fishfarming/index.asp [www.focs.ca]
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2000/july12
http://www.davidsuzuki.org/Oceans/Aquaculture/Sal
http://www.westcoastaquatic.ca/article_fishfarms_
And many others.
What I find to be self evident is that the real issue is simply to many people, not enough planet.
Parent
Gov. replies (Score:2)
Whats next? (Score:2, Funny)
Obligatory quote... (Score:4, Funny)
replacing fish in my diet (Score:5, Interesting)
I've stopped eating fish - partially because it's expensive to get good wild salmon, but mainly because I think I can do better for less of a financial outlay. I figure that fish are best eaten for their Omega-3 essential fatty acid, and I can get that fat elsewhere. I buy grass-fed beef from a family farmer, and omega-3 enriched eggs when I can't find any eggs from local farmers. The omega-3 enrichment in eggs typically comes from flax in the chicken feed.
I'm currently growing purslane [seedsofchange.com] in my Earthbox [earthbox.com], and am working on some Perilla [swallowtai...nseeds.com] seedlings too. Both are high in omega 3 [wikipedia.org] (in the form of alpha-linolenic acid [ALA]), and I plan on eating them as salad greens. (Summer heat kills plants in the desert, so fall/winter/spring are the best growing months.)
And if I ever start raising chickens [kuro5hin.org], I can grow Perilla and Purslane as feed for home-grown DHA and EPA-enriched eggs (letting the chickens do the ALA->DHA/EPA conversion).
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I saw a decrease... (Score:5, Informative)
It really helps to get a handle on this if you stop thinking of it as fishing, and no, I am not kidding. Just a little mental trick works well. Switch the term from fishing to "oceanic market hunting", then go back and look in history what market hunting did to wild terrestrial animal species, passenger pigeon, bison, migratory wildfowl, the dodo, etc. It did not take long historically speaking to see humongous stock depletion. Ocean fishing is market hunting, it will have the same effect eventually, there's no way around it. The time frame may be arguable, but the effect won't if let to go on like it is now, because there will be demand, even if it is only from the top 2% of thee wealthiest. I mean, they used to serve *plovers tongues* in restaurants. That's the sort of goofy market pressure that can happen, all the way to extinction or near extinction.
The only way we managed to even remotely save a lot of terrestrial species was with a total ban on wild game hunting for commercial purposes(I will only speak of the US now I really don't have much knowledge of this from other countries). We have personal sport hunting now and that has worked with a lot of good game management in place, and that only came about from enough people noticing "hey, where did all the animals go to???" It was an almost too late collective "duh" moment, and one would hope we have a bit more data and scientific sophistication to work with now than we did in the late 1800s. And even with game management laws in place, some times desperate times can negate those factors. If you go back and look at the great depression era, some species that are in good shape suffered near total collapse, eastern white tailed deer got hunted to severely low levels back then, even though the laws were there, desperately poor people just had to eat, so they did, and the laws were just flaunted.
I agree with another poster above, in the oceans, trawling is responsible because it is so deadly efficient in killing a lot of animals. In the US they used to allow "punt guns" for waterfowl hunting, basically short barreled boat-mounted small cannon, very efficient in harvestng ducks, so efficient that during market hunting times they about wiped out some species in short order, they had to be banned outright, and now shotguns are limited to 10 gauge maximum size. I think we as humans are going to need to address this sort of thing with wild ocean hunting of fish if we don't want to suffer the same fate we did with the land animals. Heck, there has to be some more older New England and Candian slashdotters here who can remember when cod was dirt cheap in the store, I mean rdiculous cheap, I sure can, because they were so abundant, and there were still a lot of other species that were abundant so cod was considered a second tier-class fish, now it ain't so, and cod is now in a decline state and expensive.
Re:We know it's true (Score:4, Funny)
However, I am doing every stupid thing in my power to prevent this from happening.
Parent
Sorry, I'm offtopic but (Score:3, Funny)
Slashdot car analogy. (Score:3, Insightful)
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what a hard-nosed skeptic you are (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:what a hard-nosed skeptic you are (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:what a hard-nosed skeptic you are (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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Obvious implication: Nothing happened, so they were wrong. Obviously you're wrong now, and nothing's going to happen. Because, you know, nothing happened in the past.
I don't know why I'm feeding a troll, but I suppose it's too late now. By the way, don't allude to Pink Floyd, if that was your intention with "suns
Re:what a hard-nosed skeptic you are (Score:5, Informative)
The Heartland Institute, which you sited, is a FUD site. [sourcewatch.org] You've been had.
300 year old trees in rainforest areas never used to burn down every decade or so--and the rainforests of the west coast that people are acting to preserve are precisely these areas. The brush which does burn down every 10 years or so is not preserved for environmental reasons, but because it is typically near housing developments which it will take down with it when it burns. British Columbia has been dealing with this problem for the past ten years--towns that are threatened by wild burns that have been prevented unnaturally. Frankly, we've gotten too good at fighting forest fires--but rainforests are too wet to burn. Old growth stands are taken down for lumber purposes. They are old growth precisely because they do not burn down regularly. But these are precisely the trees most valuable for lumber purposes. They're also very good at conserving water tables, which is of critical importance to Northwest agriculture.
Yellowstone scrub falls in the category of forests that typically burn down on a regular basis.
As for the fish, anyone who has been following reports on fish stocks could see this coming for the past ten years. The Salmon are dying off on the West coast, the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, once the most plentiful fishing grounds on the planet, are dead, plankton, the basis of oceanic ecology, is dying off, the coast of China is pouring billions of tons of effluents into the Pacific, and bottom dragging nets have been destroying spawning habitats for decades. If this is a surprise to you, you really need to pull your head out of your ass once in a while and look around.
So, no trees, no water, no crops, and no livestock which depend on those crops. No fish, no seafood. What, exactly, did you think your kids were going to eat?
Parent
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I'm honestly amazed that people cite Crichton at all in a serious discussion. Not because I have anything against the man personally, but because he's a fiction writer.
It's like citing Stephen King on the subject of, say, epidemiology. Does anyone think The Stand is a reputable source of scientific information? No? Then why would State of Fear be? Again, nothing wrong with liking a book,
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I see your point (Score:5, Insightful)
- Sea life is dying faster than it is being replenished
- The supply is finite
Wouldn't it seem painfully obvious that we'll run out? Do you think they're really relying on the "argument from authority" fallacy? Do you think that more sea life will just magically appear? Or do you just not care? People with your worldview really confuse me. I can't figure out if it's science you distrust, or statistics, or what. "Scientists are fallible" doesn't refute any single conclusion, much less one that you can figure out for yourself to be true. This isn't quantum mechanics or some other obscure field that requires a lot of expertise. If you cut down trees faster than trees grow, you'll end up with zero trees. Change trees to fish, and what do you get? How can you manage to have such scorn for something with such serious consequences?Parent
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Re:I see your point (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:I see your point (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately, we do get a lot of food from the oceans right now. Since we only have to catch the fish instead of raising them, it's like getting all that food free. Once that gravy train runs out, we'll have to significantly increase our agricultural output to make up the shortfall. Please read that as, "Our economy will have to work harder to obtain the same amount of food."
Fisheries are a renewable resource, if you harvest from them at a sustainable rate. Think of it as having a bank account with a million dollars in it. If you live solely on the interest, it can be a huge boon, providing you many more dollars over the years than are actually in the account. But if you start spending it irresponsibly on hookers, coke, and Alienware systems, you wake up one day and find that the account is at $1072.38. Instead of providing you ten thousand dollars a year, it can now only provide you ten. Of course, you can leave it alone and it will "recover", but that process won't be complete until long after you're dead.
It galls me when people like yourself talk about how we don't need to worry about destroying resource X, because when it runs out we'll move to resource Y. Especially when that resource could be eternally productive, if people would just agree to live off the interest, instead of sucking it dry. We'll all be worse off when the fish are gone.
Parent
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Despite the extremist language, no one is actually talking about the fish being gone. Fisheries "collapsing" means there's not enough to fish. (Or even just that there'
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It really isnt that complex. In some places, two decades ago, you could go out and fish for a few hours from, or nearby the shore, and have enough fish to eat for a week. In those exact same places you can now fish for a week and not have a single fish.
I mean, this isnt some nebulous long-term effect; if you're ever fishing for sport in areas affected, it's quite noticable, and within the
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That Guy: Let's cut to the chase. There are two kinds of people: Sheep and sharks. Anyone who's a sheep is fired. Who's a sheep?
Zoidberg: Uh, excuse me? Which is the one people like to hug?
That Guy: Gutsy question. You're a shark. Sharks are winners and they don't look back 'cause they don't have necks. Necks are for sheep. [Everyone sinks down and covers their necks.] I am proud to be the shepherd of this herd of sharks and I am gonna lead you to the top in this industry
---
It's on top
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The Combine, obviously.
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Yes, once the number depletes, it'll be harder and harder to kill fish, but for those same fish it will be harder and harder to find a mate and reproduce.
American Buffalo were also almost hunted down t