The sad thing is that if we leave the oceans largely alone for several years - a decade would be better - they will recover by themselves, as happenned with the North Sea in WW2. Then they can be managed.
Not if the oceans warm up by only a few degrees, they won’t. There’ll be a new equilbrium point eventually, but it may or may not involve large amounts of edible species.
As for buffalo/bison, there’s a theory that the early white settlers found vast, over-the-horizon herds of them mainly because their primary predator, the Indians, had only recently mostly died off from smallpox etc.
No, but we need to face the realities of high tech wild harvesting techniques and modern preservation methods which makes the bounty of the ocean available to the increasing population of mankind.
Well as Ogre says it was an indiscriminant slaughter of millions of buffalo, but I don’t believe that the wild buffalo on the range could ever have sustained the present American appetite for red meat. Same with ocean fish. We need to preserve the wild stocks with good management, but we can’t look to the wild stocks to feed humanity’s appetite
As someone who has eaten plenty of both wild and farmed salmon, that is just not true. I’m sure a slab of Alberta Grade A beef tastes better than buffalo.
As someone who earns their living from the sport fishery on the west coast of Canada, I’d love to hear that the commercial fishery is banned. There is a saying here that "Thirty Chinook salmon per day feeds a commercial fisherman, while one Chinook salmon caught in the sport fishery feeds thirty people.
In summary, the days of commercial free range harvesting of wild species to feed our population are over. We need to develop an aquaculture industry throughout the world to save our oceans.
Dude, you owe it to yourself to try some bison. It’s readily available these days, and it tastes better than beef, no question.
You may be right and I’ll try it at the first opportunity. But that’s farmed bison right? (kind of worried about TB)
Ah, I said that the oceans will recover, not the stocks of species X, Y, and Z. It’s happenning anyway with species being accidentally transported in ballast tanks. As for the oceans warming, the only constant is change.
Yes, it is farmed, but in this case farmed just means they live their lives inside a fence. They’re still pretty much wild animals, and they don’t get the antibiotics/growth hormone/feedlot treatment. They are routinely checked for a variety of diseases like TB and brucellosis.
I think it’s important that someone point out that the scientist who’s been quoted in most of the articles on the situation is named Professor Boris Worm.
Many delightful puns should be zinging through this thread. Come on, people.
Facinating little economics lesson,except this is an example of whats wrong with capitalism. Short term profits long term consequences. We will strip a land ,empty an ocean anytime short term profits indicate money can be made. We need major government intervention. Unfortunately they will buy the government, The United Nations could make noise though.
The oceans ,if they can be will be emptied for money.
No: as noted earlier, it’s an example of the tragedy of the commons. No-one’s responsible for the resource, so everyone grabs as much as they can as quickly as they can.
Orange Roughy mature very slowly, with ages measured in decades and fish over a century old regularly caught.
I appreciate the effort, but I’m a bit incredulous regarding this analogy because fish don’t need infrastructure or advanced technology in the same way that humans need it to support their current population densities.
Or perhaps I’m misunderstanding the true meaning of aquaculture… “be dummmm ching!”
So, what’s the non-allegory version of the story; perhaps I’ll find that more convincing?
Also, Princhester, I had no idea that a commercially harvested fish’s reproductive cycle could be so long. I’ll agree that an argument for appropriate management is more convincing with such long reproductive cycles.
The Sausage Creature’s link was excellent. I’ll use it to change my fish consumption. There’s still plenty of yummy varieties of fish on the “best” list.
I’d like to comment on you pitting people because they don’t believe in the latest threat du jour.
In the 70’s, it was global cooling, and people were pitting each other (in the real world, not here) for not doing something about THE COMING ICE AGE. Now, people are pitting each other for not doing something about THE COMING HEAT WAVE.
The problem is that science has become completely politicized. If you don’t agree with “the consensus”, you don’t get funding. If you question the scientific underpinnings of global warming, people call for “Nuremburg style” trials to punish you. If you don’t believe one scientists claim about what our oceans will look like in fifty years, you get pitted on SDMB.
The truth is, we don’t know what will happen in fifty years, either to the climate or to the oceans. Both are complex, chaotic systems and, despite the claims of the modelers, we know very little about how to model such systems. Both are questions about which reasonable people can disagree. And neither one is served by the hype and “THE SKY IS FALLING” type of headlines that are so common these days.
For me, the best option is to pursue the “it’ll help in any case” scenario. Consider hurricanes. Whether they are intensified by a warmer climate or not, it makes sense to protect ourselves against hurricane damage by levee construction and repair. The problem in New Orleans was not that we didn’t believe in human-caused global warming. It was that we neglected the levees to the point where a Class 3 hurricane destroyed them. (Katrina had weakened to Class 3 before it made landfall.)
Regarding the ocean, we need a variety of actions to solve the problems we see now. Again, regardless of whether one believes in the doomsday scenario of a complete ocean collapse by 2048 (love to know how the authors picked that number), such actions as reducing pollution, strengthening fisheries management regulations, keeping plastics out of the ocean, and The Sausage Creature’s excellent consumer education link will all do good whether or not the oceanic ecosystem is on the verge of collapse.
Me, I pit people who place too much faith in media headlines and isolated scientific studies, and then go out screaming “All you bastards who don’t believe this should be tried and punished” …
w.
Some further thoughts on this issue.
The best thing to do after reading one of these hyped media headlines is to read the original paper. In this case, it’s Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystem Services, Wormat et al.
In it, they seem to be pressing the “collapse” theory pretty hard. For example, they say:
Any time I see some short time span like that, my Urban Legend Detector ™ starts to ring. The ocean, as I mentioned before, undergoes swings. Yes, there was a peak in 1994, and catches have decreased since then … but the trend since 1988 has been about dead level. The first thing to do when investigating a time series is to look at as long a time series as possible.
They also make some unusual claims. For example, they say that 65% of all commercially fished species in the LMEs (Large Marine Ecosystems) are collapsed, defined as catches less than 10% of the historical maximum catch.
Now that one, I just flat don’t believe. Like I said, I’m a commercial fisherman, and while there are fisheries that have collapsed (cod being a prime example), it’s not 65% of all fished species.
Nor does a “collapse” necessarily mean overfishing. The poster boy for this is the sardine fishery off of “Cannery Row” in Monterrey, California. Although overfishing was blamed at the time, it now appears that this was a consequence of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a 20-50 year swing in Pacific temperatures. When the PDO went negative in in the '40s, the sardines went elsewhere. Since the shift the other way in 1976-78, they have started to return to Monterrey Bay.
Finally, their claim of total ocean collapse by 2048 is based on the Mark Twain method … what’s the Mark Twain method? He describes it best …
Unfortunately, the authors have done the same thing — fit a curve to the current data, and extend it way out into the future. It’s lovely, and looks good on paper, but has about the same scientific weight as Mark Twain’s analysis.
They also have fitted a downwards falling power curve to the number of collapsed species, and their own graphs show that this curve has a very poor fit. Absent some justification for their use, power curve fits are not favored in scientific circles because they presume an accelerating rate of decline, forecasting imminent demise when none may be present. The poorness of the fit of their power curve to their data makes the choice very suspicious.
The authors make some very valid points. Among these are that they highlight the connection between species richness and ecosystem resilience. This is an important principle that needs to become a larger part of fisheries management. Their forecasts, however, have no validity. As Mark pointed out, extending trends is a risky business.
None of these criticisms of this particular paper means that the oceans have no problems. These are problems with the paper.
The conclusion? Well, I guess it would be the Law of Hype is still with us … and that we should refrain from pitting someone who does not agree with the headlines, or with the conclusions of a single scientific paper. They may have very valid reasons for not believing them.
w.
PS - The Law of Hype? This law says that the truth content of a media article is inversely proportion to the font size of the headline …
For those interested, there is a safe seafood guide which indicates how species are fished and how well maintained and/or damaging the methods are. It has printable cards you can take to your favourite restaurant or store to promote safe fishing practices…it’s on a link from David Suzuki’s page…I don’t know how to post a link here.
Yes, it’s a problem. Back in the day,
We urged people to have fewer children and they said mind your own goddamn business.
We spoke of the importance of birth control, and whole religions, nay, entire regions of the planet told us it was immoral.
We urged people not to have more children than they could afford and were condemned as eugenicists.
We totally, totally dropped the ball on the population side of the environmental equation.
Now the fish will run out, the oil will run out, and then the water, too, and in the dark decades of chaos to come we will bitterly rue that we didn’t buy ourselves another generation or so by limiting growth.
Well how was that? In six years of Doperhood it’s the first time I tried to pit anything that I can remember.
Meh. Good post, but as a pitting? Too sober, not angry enough. 2.5, sorry.
You missed my point. Entirely. My scenario laid out how humans could go extinct even when they are numerically present. Absolute numbers mean nothing. And this would be the case even if we were talking about Stone Age humans unaccostomed to air conditioning and bug repellent. For a population to be viable, mating must be possible. It is impossible to mate with someone who’s half a continent away.
If you’re a female cod and the closest male is two thousand miles away, are you going to be having laying any eggs time soon?
Convincing? I honestly don’t know what it is that you’re having a hard time believing. Are you suggesting that humans can’t overfish populations to extinction? Because that would be a quite a statement to make, and defies the very basics of conservation ecology.
Well they aren’t exactly whales, are they?
Whales, definitely, you could hunt them to extinction. Even a “healthy” population of whales might number in the tens of thousands and certainly humans have the ability to hunt them to a level where mating becomes impossible.
And certainly this is true for certain species of fish with low population densities, long reproductive periods, etc.
But for most fish? I really doubt it. Even if the fish become rare enough that they’re economically impossible to harvest, I don’t think that they’ll have trouble finding each other to get it on.
If a fishing boat can cover one cubic mile of sea-water and only catch 150 halibut, that fish will probably be too rare to fish and make money off of, but it certainly isn’t low enough to cause the sudden extinction of the species.
But maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps halibut can be economically harvested at 2 fish for 100 cubic miles of ocean, but I doubt it.
So I would encourage you to make your argument from actual numbers and science regarding the ecology of fish as opposed to some far flung metaphor involving alien abduction of humans and discussions of lacking a Starbucks to meet up at. Because frankly we all know that fish hate Frappucinos.