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 practice of calculating cod populations from catch rates in the commercial fishery – if fishers filled their quotas with ease, then officials believed the stock size was at adequately high levels. However, fishing technology had become so efficient by the 1970s that commercial catch rates remained high even as the cod population dropped to dangerously low levels. Electronic tracking devices could find fish no matter how small their numbers and trawlers could harvest most species with relative ease. ...
Although overfishing in international waters did tremendous damage to northern cod, Canada also failed to maintain a sustainable fishery within its 200-mile limit. The government ignored warnings from inshore fishers and university scientists that cod stocks were in danger and chose to maintain quotas instead of scaling back the fishery, in large part to prevent economic losses and massive unemployment.
By the early 1990s, after decades of sustained intensive fishing from Canadian and international fleets, the northern cod stocks collapsed. The spawning biomass of northern cod had dropped by about 93 per cent in only 30 years – from 1.6 million tonnes in 1962 to between 72,000 and 110,000 tonnes in 1992. In July of that year, Canada imposed a moratorium on the catching of northern cod and ended an international industry that had endured for close to 500 years.
They called off the season in 1992 and it never came back. A pillar of the local economy in the Maritimes was wrecked.
As for climate change and its impact on East Coast fishing, I've read that lobster fishing is no longer a viable industry in Long Island and it's declining in southern New England as waters get warmer and the lobsters permanently migrate north.
I work in the Alaska fishery and am typing this while sat in one of the largest fish processing facilities in the western hemisphere. I have the spare time because, well, there's no crabs coming in and everything else is mostly out of season. About half of the boats on Discovery belong to the company I work for, the largest in the US. So I'll take the opportunity to share some on-the-ground observations.
Overfishing: It's not this. A billion crabs is north of 5 billion pounds, in other words on the order of 100x the US crabbing fleet's capability. I would hazard to guess there isn't enough crabbing gear on the planet earth to have achieved that catch.
Foreign fleets: If this is the case, the real bad news is that the Rusky's and/or Chinese have developed cloaking device technology.
Trawling: We're talking about the bottom-scrapers. They're new on the scene relative to the crabbers. Alaska allows 4 1/3 million crabs as bycatch (waste), amounting to ~20 million pounds, which would be a decent annual catch. Even though this is thought to interfere specifically with breeding grounds, it isn't enough to have caused this depopulation event. It's more than enough to piss of the crabbers though, since it actually is unfair.
Disease: Is there a precedent in Earth's natural history of a 90% die-off in two years due to disease? We might have to go back to the meteor that killed the dinosaurs. Which brings us to:
Climate change: There was a similar depopulation event in the early 80s. 1980 still holds the annual catch record at 200 million pounds (~40 million animals), a sustained harvest without noticeable impact on the stock. The waters warmed, population (and yield) suddenly tanked on a similar scale, and never recovered to anywhere near those levels. The basic ecological dynamic of a fishery is this: deep, cold, nutrient-rich waters are pushed by a current into a steep continental shelf, forcing them toward the surface where it fertilizes plankton, the foundation of sea life. The volcanic Aleutian archipelago is such a place, another notable one is Peru's fishery. A change in sea temperature can effect this dynamic, in addition to the breeding and general survival of crabs.
However long it takes for the stock to recover (probably a long time, even if the environmental conditions do return to favorable), one outcome is almost a foregone conclusion: independent crabbers will have be forced out, and only the larger companies, with deeper pockets and more diversified across fish species, will survive, leading to another round of conglomeration.
Mick, thanks for taking the time to share your observations and expertise about this industry.
Just want to say that my point about sharing the Canadian cod industry collapse was to illustrate the long-term effects - it still hasn't recovered 30 years later. And maybe that dovetails with what you're saying about indie crabbers being driven out, although from what I understand of the Canadian situation there is basically no industry now, indie or otherwise.
In uni we had classes about systems modeling and fishing population was one of the examples studied. Overfishing can cause these phenomenons not so muche because you actually fish 1bln unit and are 1bln down, but because even a modest amount of overfishing past a critical point puts your population on a crashing decrease due to reduced reprodution. So if under normal circumstances your next generation would be lets say 5bln crabs, because the reduced population makes it much (non linearly) harder to repro now you only have 0.5bln. And over a couple years everything is dried up even thought you maybe "only" overfished 200mln units.
> Disease: Is there a precedent in Earth's natural history of a 90% die-off in two years due to disease
On mobile, so I can't provide a link. Look up sea star wasting disease. It's affected several species of sea star from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico. One species, the sunflower star went from being everywhere to a red listed endangered species over just a couple of years.
It could be overfishing. That's what it was with Cod. The thing is depending on the stock assessment model used for Alaskan Crab, the data fed into said model (surveys, fishery catch etc.) they could have been over estimating abundance and setting too high quotas for years until poof there's no more.
When I was in Norway about ten years ago, I heard a story about Kamchatka crabs, introduced by Soviet scientists to Murmansk and then, due to absence of natural predators started migration first around North Cape and then south towards the Gulfstream. Norway captain of our yacht said, that in warmer waters crabs are more active, so they became an ecological danger of sorts. So I thought that with sea warming we should see a rise, not a drop of crab population, aren't we?
If the world doesn't get over fossil fuel addiction and allowing oil companies to push us to near extinction for their profits, really soon, the worse is yet to come.
It's idiotic from an economic point of view too. There'd still be an industry if they'd scaled it back and made it more sustainable. Instead the industry has been wiped out and that's that.
Top 2 comments are like "oh yeah this is over fishing" when the only thing in common with cod are that they're in the ocean.
Either folks aren't RTFA or are being willfully ignorant. Over fishing to the tune 1bn crabs when juvenile populations from 2018 and 2019 looked great? No way.
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.
Interesting what is and isn’t available. Because I clicked this link to see not recognizing the name Finest Kind and was like, oh they play that on the folk program pretty often, I know that song.
Yes, but this is most likely not cause by over-fishing.
Snow crab fishing is relatively strictly regulated since a long time, and while there are always many ways this might be side stepped the amount of missing crabs is way to high in a too short amount of time to just because of over fishing AFIK.
More likely it is a combination of multiple factors putting strain on the population leading to a collapse event. One main driver for many of this factors is probably climate change.
Something similar happened not to far away of where I lived (on a much smaller scale). Tones of fish died. There where many factors which where not grate and in the end too many algae where blamed as main source, but if you look into it it's basically: Low water levels due to multiple years of extremely dry and hot summers strain the ecosystem in various ways and make a explosion algae much more likely. Still that wouldn't have been enough to kill all the fish but throw in the fertilizer from nearby fields even further amplifying the problems and a small contamination with chemicals (which by itself wouldn't have cause it either) and most of the fish died. Or to say it differently with climate change putting strain of water ecosystems we might need much stricter limits about what human causes we allow to put strain on them.
Picking on you, sorry, but what do you mean when you say 'climate change'. I don't think you're saying anything, it's like saying 'bad thing'.
What caused what exactly. Eg, if day warmer waters mean there is less habitat that the crabs can live in, I get that. Or if the deep, cold ocean temperatures have not changed, then that's not it. Or if the crabs have been poisoned by fertiliser, then say that.
I do resent the idea of this catch all term 'climate change' that appears to have answered something while saying nothing. I guess it appeals to us on self masochistic/'original sin' grounds - we want to blame ourselves, and that is a decent, scientific sounding answer that passes muster.
Fwiw, given one of mikedeen's comments, it sounds to me like trawling, and the destruction of habitat, is also a possibility.
I have large cognitive dissonance to "we shouldn't be the world police" and "globalism is bad." At face value I agree, but...
If you believe in the rule of law and human rights, then globalism seems like a natural consequence, as does policing the world.
What would happen if you let China have global hegemony and they become the over-fishing police? What type of enforcement do you think they might have (or non enforcement, or selective enforcement).
It seems clear with world scale commons, there must be both a common set of laws (globalization) and an entity capable of enforcing those laws (America is the world police).
Unfortunately, as someone who the intelligence agency in my land said, ultimate power brings ultimate corruption. If there is no #2 then no one can police #1
> If you believe in the rule of law and human rights, then globalism seems like a natural consequence, as does policing the world.
You might ask, what problems is globalism going to solve that treaties and national cooperation can't today? More importantly, what will those mechanisms be and will they be just as vulnerable to the problems of corruption and interconnection that plague the meaningful enforcement of treaties and agreements today?
I haven't heard an actual appeal for structural "globalism" that answers these basic challenges.. as such, I mostly see it as a grift designed to remove democratic and republican control from the hands of individuals and cede them entirely to the technocratic machinations of the "new world order."
Recently, we did have a very globally similar response to a world wide event, and I'm not at all surprised that during that time the rich managed to make themselves much richer and the middle class has mostly taken the hit. If that's a hint to what "globalism" has to offer, you can keep it. We'll have to figure out the fishing problem some other way.
Unfortunately, there are numerous problems with fish farming.
For one, predatory farmed fish, such as salmon, are often fed from fish meal made from wild fish, which means there's no net benefit.
Fish are farmed intensively, in much denser populations than found in the wild. In this type of environment, water pollution and animal welfare are serious concerns — disease and parasites such as lice are a big problem. It's not hard to find reports of farmed fish in horrifying condition and conditions.
As a side note, intensive farming of pigs, chickens and cattle is a major source of pollution of inland waterways. This is a direct cause of the dramatic decline of freshwater fish populations in many parts of the world.
Disease like CWD and avian flu can result in massive culls of farmed animals. High density animal farming bears risk of epidemics, and fish farming is no exception. As with most things in life, there are no easy answers.
So often that you could say almost always. To make the joke even funnier, the feed is loaded with supplements and medications which are extremely disruptive to local biomes. There is nothing sustainable about most forms of fish farming, and the externalities are absurd.
The percentage of wild fish as a proportion of feed has been going down. Researchers and companies are aware of this problem. Duckweed and farmed insect formulated fish feed are being tested and produced right now. It's still not great that wild fishes not fit for human consumption and whose capture is contributing to overfishing are used to support fish farming.
3. Let private interests have unfettered access to the Commons
4. Problems!
The tragedy is supposedly Commons, but clearly the problem is private interests having unregulated access to the Commons. Tragedy of Private Interests?
In any case this seems like more of a climate change issue (again…)
How is it a fallacy? Isn't the whole idea behind it exactly what you said? The tragedy is not the commons itself, it's the tragedy of what happens to the commons.
After all, the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is what happens to Romeo and Juliet.
This has to be the most obtuse thing I've read today. First, you bait us in with the bold claim "tragedy of the commons is a fallacy", but then it turns out you're not actually going to show a flaw in the idea that the tragedy of the commons is real. Instead you're just playing a word game which leads to some vaguely socialist talking points.
Its particularly tedious as the phrase "tragedy of the commons" has nothing to do with assigning "blame" to the commons (or to the private interests). The phrase itself is not an prescription, merely a diagnosis. Literally no one uses "tragedy of the commons" as capitalism apologia. What an absurd straw man.
No actually, lets not rename all the well established concepts in economics just to give them a certain political lean. That's not actually helpful to understanding anything.
People call out tragedy of the commons a lot, for cases where it seems like purely a tragedy of capitalism. Nobody overfished these crabs to eat themselves. A globalized food market was willing to pay for crab, and has no mechanism to value long term supply. People who think it’s wrong to overfish will stop, and people who don’t care will replace them as long as the market is willing to pay.
What part of that requires a “commons” to tragically be uncared for? It’s money + markets. We see the same thing in any “natural resource” - wood, mining, oil, wild mushrooms, ivory, you name it.
> cases where it seems like purely a tragedy of capitalism
We have evidence the Hudson Bay was being overfished for oysters in the decades preceding European settlement. Any explanation beginning and ending with capitalism is about as useless as blaming every problem on greed.
Veganism, like all other idealogies that could be described as “if only everyone did X,” will never, ever be as widely-adopted as you’d like without authoritarianism driving that adoption.
Also — I’m saying this as a former vegan — I have developed so many food allergies that I literally cannot be vegan anymore (the vast, vast majority of my food allergies are plants). And yes I carry an epi-pen, they can kill me, etc. If I ate plants only, I would die.
Reality is a whole hell of a lot more complicated than those casually pushing ultimatums on the internet ever seem to realize or acknowledge.
The issue is that people en masse don’t actually care all that much about the cruelty of killing animals so long as it’s not reasonably torturous. The future, however dystopian you may see it, is sustainably growing the animals we want to eat for slaughter.
King Salmon fishing was shut down in much of Alaska this season as well. I was there during the time and driving through the Kenai Peninsula was much different than previous years. Normally, you'll see people lined up on the river all over the place.
There was at least one piece of good news this year. The river that hosts the Fat Bear competition had a record number of salmon this year. I think the estimate was 74 million.
The captain's take on the issue includes climate change, over crabbing areas known to be struggling and trawling. The article also includes an explanation as to how cod could be responsible due to climate change offering less ice protection for the crab.
Right, and so with that, demand should taper down a bit. But only until other things become more expensive and now that food source is the cheaper one...
But really, is it really the problem? I'm considering the idea from both angles of supply and demand right now. I mean, once upon a time ago, stuff like crab and lobster was considered poor persons food. It was so plentiful that the story goes 'You could just walk down to the local ocean side and scoop some out of the ocean without any trouble'.
The way I see it is this. Pricing is indicative of supply and demand. If demand is high enough, suppliers will attempt to meet that demand. When demand wanes, supply burgeons, thus creating a reason to lower prices so that demand matches supply again. So in a sense, while price would seem to be the culprit, I think it more or less comes down to the fickle nature of the human.
Take red lobster for example. I never eat there, because they always somehow have some 'sale' happening. This means one of two things for me. Either they are selling old product as "fresh" which is not possible in many places they operate, or they are selling under the 'actual' price to increase demand to help meet supply.
Now extend that to the rest of the industry. Where does that land us?
In my mind, it means we are over fishing the species, all because other companies like RL allow for it to happen by continuously artificially spiking demand. Because at the end of the day, even if RL doesn't make profit, the fishermen do. RL and others like them keep buying it. It doesn't matter to the supplier of these restaurants if the food is being eaten or tossed. It's already caught.
Well, I don't like any seafood, so, on the one hand this does not affect me at all. On the other hand... this is just one more piece of data to add to the ever growing pile of how badly we are ruining the planet for any life above the level of single cell organisms. We are screwed.
Sure it does. The billions who subsist on seafood will now have to eat eggs, pork, beef. This will cause supply issues of those things. If you're a vegetarian you might be safe, though those too will be in higher demand maybe.
There's also water shortages, see the drought that's drying up the Mississippi river. Without water we'll have less and less crop yields.
We slowly had changes happen over 3 decades, then all of a sudden hit a turning point where we're breaking records yearly, maybe even monthly, and starting to get some feedback loops brewing.
The govts of the world though don't seem to think it's a big priority, lucky for them they're all ran by old people who will be dead before it really gets out of hand.
Food shortages/expenses is probably one of the few things that would actually get the average person to revolt/do something other than work their crap career-job that cant buy them a house.
This could be fun ! I mean when it happens it will be awful for those that have homes, good careers, etc. But still will be an interesting part of history to observe.
Readit News
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 practice of calculating cod populations from catch rates in the commercial fishery – if fishers filled their quotas with ease, then officials believed the stock size was at adequately high levels. However, fishing technology had become so efficient by the 1970s that commercial catch rates remained high even as the cod population dropped to dangerously low levels. Electronic tracking devices could find fish no matter how small their numbers and trawlers could harvest most species with relative ease. ...
Although overfishing in international waters did tremendous damage to northern cod, Canada also failed to maintain a sustainable fishery within its 200-mile limit. The government ignored warnings from inshore fishers and university scientists that cod stocks were in danger and chose to maintain quotas instead of scaling back the fishery, in large part to prevent economic losses and massive unemployment.
By the early 1990s, after decades of sustained intensive fishing from Canadian and international fleets, the northern cod stocks collapsed. The spawning biomass of northern cod had dropped by about 93 per cent in only 30 years – from 1.6 million tonnes in 1962 to between 72,000 and 110,000 tonnes in 1992. In July of that year, Canada imposed a moratorium on the catching of northern cod and ended an international industry that had endured for close to 500 years.
https://www.heritage.nf.ca/articles/economy/moratorium.php
They called off the season in 1992 and it never came back. A pillar of the local economy in the Maritimes was wrecked.
As for climate change and its impact on East Coast fishing, I've read that lobster fishing is no longer a viable industry in Long Island and it's declining in southern New England as waters get warmer and the lobsters permanently migrate north.
Overfishing: It's not this. A billion crabs is north of 5 billion pounds, in other words on the order of 100x the US crabbing fleet's capability. I would hazard to guess there isn't enough crabbing gear on the planet earth to have achieved that catch.
Foreign fleets: If this is the case, the real bad news is that the Rusky's and/or Chinese have developed cloaking device technology.
Trawling: We're talking about the bottom-scrapers. They're new on the scene relative to the crabbers. Alaska allows 4 1/3 million crabs as bycatch (waste), amounting to ~20 million pounds, which would be a decent annual catch. Even though this is thought to interfere specifically with breeding grounds, it isn't enough to have caused this depopulation event. It's more than enough to piss of the crabbers though, since it actually is unfair.
Disease: Is there a precedent in Earth's natural history of a 90% die-off in two years due to disease? We might have to go back to the meteor that killed the dinosaurs. Which brings us to:
Climate change: There was a similar depopulation event in the early 80s. 1980 still holds the annual catch record at 200 million pounds (~40 million animals), a sustained harvest without noticeable impact on the stock. The waters warmed, population (and yield) suddenly tanked on a similar scale, and never recovered to anywhere near those levels. The basic ecological dynamic of a fishery is this: deep, cold, nutrient-rich waters are pushed by a current into a steep continental shelf, forcing them toward the surface where it fertilizes plankton, the foundation of sea life. The volcanic Aleutian archipelago is such a place, another notable one is Peru's fishery. A change in sea temperature can effect this dynamic, in addition to the breeding and general survival of crabs.
However long it takes for the stock to recover (probably a long time, even if the environmental conditions do return to favorable), one outcome is almost a foregone conclusion: independent crabbers will have be forced out, and only the larger companies, with deeper pockets and more diversified across fish species, will survive, leading to another round of conglomeration.
Just want to say that my point about sharing the Canadian cod industry collapse was to illustrate the long-term effects - it still hasn't recovered 30 years later. And maybe that dovetails with what you're saying about indie crabbers being driven out, although from what I understand of the Canadian situation there is basically no industry now, indie or otherwise.
Curious: What is your line of work in Alaska?
On mobile, so I can't provide a link. Look up sea star wasting disease. It's affected several species of sea star from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico. One species, the sunflower star went from being everywhere to a red listed endangered species over just a couple of years.
With all due respect, fishing many will take out a huge portion of a potential next generation, so it’s not about affecting the population as is.
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/10/07/asia/russia-kamchatka-tox...
https://doi.org/10.1126%2Fscience.aac9819
So sad to see how easily long term catastrophic damage is justified by short term gains.
Either folks aren't RTFA or are being willfully ignorant. Over fishing to the tune 1bn crabs when juvenile populations from 2018 and 2019 looked great? No way.
Deleted Comment
For example, nobody is predicting a catastrophic decline in the population of pigs, chickens, and cattle.
Fish farming is the future.
Snow crab fishing is relatively strictly regulated since a long time, and while there are always many ways this might be side stepped the amount of missing crabs is way to high in a too short amount of time to just because of over fishing AFIK.
More likely it is a combination of multiple factors putting strain on the population leading to a collapse event. One main driver for many of this factors is probably climate change.
Something similar happened not to far away of where I lived (on a much smaller scale). Tones of fish died. There where many factors which where not grate and in the end too many algae where blamed as main source, but if you look into it it's basically: Low water levels due to multiple years of extremely dry and hot summers strain the ecosystem in various ways and make a explosion algae much more likely. Still that wouldn't have been enough to kill all the fish but throw in the fertilizer from nearby fields even further amplifying the problems and a small contamination with chemicals (which by itself wouldn't have cause it either) and most of the fish died. Or to say it differently with climate change putting strain of water ecosystems we might need much stricter limits about what human causes we allow to put strain on them.
What caused what exactly. Eg, if day warmer waters mean there is less habitat that the crabs can live in, I get that. Or if the deep, cold ocean temperatures have not changed, then that's not it. Or if the crabs have been poisoned by fertiliser, then say that.
I do resent the idea of this catch all term 'climate change' that appears to have answered something while saying nothing. I guess it appeals to us on self masochistic/'original sin' grounds - we want to blame ourselves, and that is a decent, scientific sounding answer that passes muster.
Fwiw, given one of mikedeen's comments, it sounds to me like trawling, and the destruction of habitat, is also a possibility.
If you believe in the rule of law and human rights, then globalism seems like a natural consequence, as does policing the world.
What would happen if you let China have global hegemony and they become the over-fishing police? What type of enforcement do you think they might have (or non enforcement, or selective enforcement).
It seems clear with world scale commons, there must be both a common set of laws (globalization) and an entity capable of enforcing those laws (America is the world police).
Whether anyone is can be debated, but must there be only one sheriff?
Deleted Comment
You might ask, what problems is globalism going to solve that treaties and national cooperation can't today? More importantly, what will those mechanisms be and will they be just as vulnerable to the problems of corruption and interconnection that plague the meaningful enforcement of treaties and agreements today?
I haven't heard an actual appeal for structural "globalism" that answers these basic challenges.. as such, I mostly see it as a grift designed to remove democratic and republican control from the hands of individuals and cede them entirely to the technocratic machinations of the "new world order."
Recently, we did have a very globally similar response to a world wide event, and I'm not at all surprised that during that time the rich managed to make themselves much richer and the middle class has mostly taken the hit. If that's a hint to what "globalism" has to offer, you can keep it. We'll have to figure out the fishing problem some other way.
For one, predatory farmed fish, such as salmon, are often fed from fish meal made from wild fish, which means there's no net benefit.
Fish are farmed intensively, in much denser populations than found in the wild. In this type of environment, water pollution and animal welfare are serious concerns — disease and parasites such as lice are a big problem. It's not hard to find reports of farmed fish in horrifying condition and conditions.
As a side note, intensive farming of pigs, chickens and cattle is a major source of pollution of inland waterways. This is a direct cause of the dramatic decline of freshwater fish populations in many parts of the world.
> For example, nobody is predicting a catastrophic decline in the population of pigs, chickens, and cattle.
That's a great point.
So true...
It's hard to get people to care enough to do anything about it until enough people are affected.
Which is no fun for the sea life and poorer humans waiting for things to get bad enough that sufficient action is taken.
1. Postulate the Commons
2. Also postulate private interests
3. Let private interests have unfettered access to the Commons
4. Problems!
The tragedy is supposedly Commons, but clearly the problem is private interests having unregulated access to the Commons. Tragedy of Private Interests?
In any case this seems like more of a climate change issue (again…)
After all, the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is what happens to Romeo and Juliet.
Its particularly tedious as the phrase "tragedy of the commons" has nothing to do with assigning "blame" to the commons (or to the private interests). The phrase itself is not an prescription, merely a diagnosis. Literally no one uses "tragedy of the commons" as capitalism apologia. What an absurd straw man.
No actually, lets not rename all the well established concepts in economics just to give them a certain political lean. That's not actually helpful to understanding anything.
Deleted Comment
What part of that requires a “commons” to tragically be uncared for? It’s money + markets. We see the same thing in any “natural resource” - wood, mining, oil, wild mushrooms, ivory, you name it.
We have evidence the Hudson Bay was being overfished for oysters in the decades preceding European settlement. Any explanation beginning and ending with capitalism is about as useless as blaming every problem on greed.
Also — I’m saying this as a former vegan — I have developed so many food allergies that I literally cannot be vegan anymore (the vast, vast majority of my food allergies are plants). And yes I carry an epi-pen, they can kill me, etc. If I ate plants only, I would die.
Reality is a whole hell of a lot more complicated than those casually pushing ultimatums on the internet ever seem to realize or acknowledge.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/into-t...
The captain's take on the issue includes climate change, over crabbing areas known to be struggling and trawling. The article also includes an explanation as to how cod could be responsible due to climate change offering less ice protection for the crab.
Heh heh. I imagine fishermen hauling in a net full of potatoes and pasta.
Dead Comment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuIoego-xVc
Don't expect your plate of crab or lobster to be cheap these next few years folks.
And if it is cheap somehow, stop eating there. They are probably part of the problem.
But really, is it really the problem? I'm considering the idea from both angles of supply and demand right now. I mean, once upon a time ago, stuff like crab and lobster was considered poor persons food. It was so plentiful that the story goes 'You could just walk down to the local ocean side and scoop some out of the ocean without any trouble'.
The way I see it is this. Pricing is indicative of supply and demand. If demand is high enough, suppliers will attempt to meet that demand. When demand wanes, supply burgeons, thus creating a reason to lower prices so that demand matches supply again. So in a sense, while price would seem to be the culprit, I think it more or less comes down to the fickle nature of the human.
Take red lobster for example. I never eat there, because they always somehow have some 'sale' happening. This means one of two things for me. Either they are selling old product as "fresh" which is not possible in many places they operate, or they are selling under the 'actual' price to increase demand to help meet supply.
Now extend that to the rest of the industry. Where does that land us?
In my mind, it means we are over fishing the species, all because other companies like RL allow for it to happen by continuously artificially spiking demand. Because at the end of the day, even if RL doesn't make profit, the fishermen do. RL and others like them keep buying it. It doesn't matter to the supplier of these restaurants if the food is being eaten or tossed. It's already caught.
Make sense?
There's also water shortages, see the drought that's drying up the Mississippi river. Without water we'll have less and less crop yields.
We slowly had changes happen over 3 decades, then all of a sudden hit a turning point where we're breaking records yearly, maybe even monthly, and starting to get some feedback loops brewing.
The govts of the world though don't seem to think it's a big priority, lucky for them they're all ran by old people who will be dead before it really gets out of hand.
There is another possible outcome... :/
This could be fun ! I mean when it happens it will be awful for those that have homes, good careers, etc. But still will be an interesting part of history to observe.