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.
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.
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, 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.
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…)
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.
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.
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.
a billion seems like such a huge number when you consider its referring to giant crabs. Had no idea there were that many; but never really thought about it. Seems insane for there to be that many let alone for that many to be missing.
At least we still have lab grown meat, as it appears we'll soon have to get all our sustenance from labs since we'll probably be the last living creature on earth, sooner than later.
This is wild to see. Especially after one of the best salmon seasons this summer in AK. Prices being high helped, but the salmon population was excellent.
How feasible is it to grow crabs in captivity? We need to start farming food, no way natural ecosystems can support themselves _and_ humans at current levels.
Searching suggests it is done more in SE Asia than in the US (this might be a "what does the cuisine focus on?")
RAS Vertical Farming for Mud Crabs - https://youtu.be/XQJmZz4mdWY (there's a bit of an accent, I'd recommend subtitles)
I'll also suggest a watch of How America's Biggest Indoor Shrimp Farm Sells 2 Million Shrimp Every Year - https://youtu.be/1AK_RQ1uaGs (the American diet tends to have more shrimp than crab). And for crawfish (not indoor) https://youtu.be/_bggaA5AURA
Interestingly, raising animals in captivity is much much more difficult than I imagined.
IIRC - Guns, Germs, and Steel had a pretty good point that we didn't so much domesticate animals and plants as there were plants and animals that were pre-disposed to domestication.
No one speaks of the elephants in the room
1. Russia is well known to fish illegally in bearing Seas
2.There was a boom in warm waters for warm water fish that
some fisherman switched to, if you watch a certain
Discovery series you know which fish even.
3.Alaska is one of the states that succeeded in
protecting fish populations as opposed to some other US states.
Since we're all speculating, I would guess that ocean acidification could be at play here. The arctic regions are carbon sinks so they experience acidification earlier than other parts of the ocean. When the CO2 is absorbed into the ocean it causes the pH level to decrease, making the waters more acidic. This inhibits CaCO3 (calcium carbonate) formation found in many ocean species like crabs.
If there's a rapid die off of this magnitude there aren't many other problems which would match this level of impact. It could be something else environmental like the water temperature but it doesn't seem like an anthropogenic problem. Similar problems have happened already for other species like oysters.[0]
I was an intern with NOAA in a fisheries lab studying ocean acidification back in college in 2011. There was a large die off in oyster farms the year before which wiped out a good size of their production. The issue then was that the farms were cycling the water in directly from the ocean into the tanks without adjusting the pH. As the pH in the ocean water dropped, it killed off all of the oysters in the farms all at once. They had to do a quick about face to treat the water to regain the catch.
Ocean acidification seemed like a problem that would get worse and worse over time. The estimate back then was that it would take roughly 50 years for the CO2 in the air to equilibrate with the CO2 in the ocean. Since we won't stop emitting any time soon it's going to get a lot more acidic.
I'm a decade behind on the status but back then it seemed like there were a lot of unknowns around the problem too. I'm not sure if more has come to light on the impacts it might have for ecology or the biochemistry of different species. It was a complex problem so predicting the outcome seemed extremely difficult. Hopefully more is known but if not surprises like this would likely crop up. For shellfish, once it goes under a certain pH threshold for a species the young will be unable to form shells which can cause them to die en mass in a short time period.
It doesn't seem like a problem that we can engineer our way out of. The best we can do is probably to monitor and perform science experiments to see some of it coming. Then try to mitigate the damage.
It seems like NOAA would have been able to call out the calcification problem for the snow crab in advance though since there have been issues with other crab species.[1] They probably would have detected the pH change in the waters too so this might not be the cause. Either way it's an interesting subject to learn about.
What of the other parts of the world willing to fish into extinction? It's nice to hear we are doing something to benefit a species that is suffering but is this anything? Are we not just driving them into someone else's snare?
[+] [-] ilamont|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mickdeek86|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jjr8|3 years ago|reply
https://doi.org/10.1126%2Fscience.aac9819
[+] [-] tromp|3 years ago|reply
So sad to see how easily long term catastrophic damage is justified by short term gains.
[+] [-] dfc|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] starik36|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] beefman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterBright|3 years ago|reply
For example, nobody is predicting a catastrophic decline in the population of pigs, chickens, and cattle.
Fish farming is the future.
[+] [-] dathinab|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hayst4ck|3 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] darraghenright|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] klyrs|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pGuitar|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ijidak|3 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] avgcorrection|3 years ago|reply
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…)
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kennywinker|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] myshpa|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattw2121|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reaperducer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cluoma|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pgrote|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 8bitsrule|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oxfeed65261|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DFHippie|3 years ago|reply
Heh heh. I imagine fishermen hauling in a net full of potatoes and pasta.
[+] [-] carapace|3 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuIoego-xVc
[+] [-] mcwone|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Manu40|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] beowulfey|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DoingIsLearning|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] irrational|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gremlinsinc|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] padjo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcynix|3 years ago|reply
https://www.montereyherald.com/2020/11/03/the-sardine-war-hi...
[+] [-] wonderwonder|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glonq|3 years ago|reply
Sig and Wild Bill learn how to knit.
[+] [-] tzs|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.discovery.com/shows/deadliest-catch-the-viking-r...
[+] [-] gremlinsinc|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] celestialcheese|3 years ago|reply
Source: Family commercial fishes in AK
[+] [-] washedup|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] outworlder|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shagie|3 years ago|reply
Searching suggests it is done more in SE Asia than in the US (this might be a "what does the cuisine focus on?")
RAS Vertical Farming for Mud Crabs - https://youtu.be/XQJmZz4mdWY (there's a bit of an accent, I'd recommend subtitles)
I'll also suggest a watch of How America's Biggest Indoor Shrimp Farm Sells 2 Million Shrimp Every Year - https://youtu.be/1AK_RQ1uaGs (the American diet tends to have more shrimp than crab). And for crawfish (not indoor) https://youtu.be/_bggaA5AURA
[+] [-] onlyrealcuzzo|3 years ago|reply
IIRC - Guns, Germs, and Steel had a pretty good point that we didn't so much domesticate animals and plants as there were plants and animals that were pre-disposed to domestication.
[+] [-] fredgrott|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rex_lupi|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greenyouse|3 years ago|reply
If there's a rapid die off of this magnitude there aren't many other problems which would match this level of impact. It could be something else environmental like the water temperature but it doesn't seem like an anthropogenic problem. Similar problems have happened already for other species like oysters.[0]
I was an intern with NOAA in a fisheries lab studying ocean acidification back in college in 2011. There was a large die off in oyster farms the year before which wiped out a good size of their production. The issue then was that the farms were cycling the water in directly from the ocean into the tanks without adjusting the pH. As the pH in the ocean water dropped, it killed off all of the oysters in the farms all at once. They had to do a quick about face to treat the water to regain the catch.
Ocean acidification seemed like a problem that would get worse and worse over time. The estimate back then was that it would take roughly 50 years for the CO2 in the air to equilibrate with the CO2 in the ocean. Since we won't stop emitting any time soon it's going to get a lot more acidic.
I'm a decade behind on the status but back then it seemed like there were a lot of unknowns around the problem too. I'm not sure if more has come to light on the impacts it might have for ecology or the biochemistry of different species. It was a complex problem so predicting the outcome seemed extremely difficult. Hopefully more is known but if not surprises like this would likely crop up. For shellfish, once it goes under a certain pH threshold for a species the young will be unable to form shells which can cause them to die en mass in a short time period.
It doesn't seem like a problem that we can engineer our way out of. The best we can do is probably to monitor and perform science experiments to see some of it coming. Then try to mitigate the damage.
It seems like NOAA would have been able to call out the calcification problem for the snow crab in advance though since there have been issues with other crab species.[1] They probably would have detected the pH change in the waters too so this might not be the cause. Either way it's an interesting subject to learn about.
[0] https://blogs.oregonstate.edu/breakingwaves/2011/06/28/ocean... [1] https://research.noaa.gov/article/ArtMID/587/ArticleID/2581/...
NOAA's ocean acidification program https://oceanacidification.noaa.gov/Home.aspx
This was a good 2011 report from the IPCC if you're interested. https://www.ipcc.ch/publication/ipcc-workshop-on-ocean-acidi...
[+] [-] hannasm|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djmips|3 years ago|reply