You’re going to have your teeth in that one until the so-called rapture, the appocolpyes, comes around.
Yeah but so what, triggercut. Where’s your link to a blog?
I dunno. My first thought was that I’m not gonna live that long. Then my second thought (and this is a stretch for me) was, this is just about the ones that we eat right, not ALL of the fish? What about deep sea monster fish?
And assuming the hoopla is true (which I don’t believe) and all of the fish die out, what does this mean on a biosphere level? Does that mean that plankton will proliferate? Will coral grow exponentially? How will our seas change? And how will it affect people after I’m dead?
I have a couple of kids, but neither of them like fish. OTOH, if the seas stop producing oxygen they’re fucked.
Whatever, I’m gonna grab a tuna sandwich while I still can. Maybe shoot a fisherman on the way to the grocery store…
The Gorton’s guy is DEAD, you hear me, DEAD!
One of the things they leave out of a study like that is small fish. yup, the “filters” of the ocean like Sardines. It’s OK to tell me about Salmon and Tuna, Halibut & Flounder, etc.
I guess that can be dismissed with a study too? I’m sorry, but I’m too old to be spoon feed a bunch of crap. There’s a bunch of studies that says that the our oceans are declining and one says it’s not. I was born but not yesterday.
One of the biggest problems isn’t even fishing, it’s CO2 and pollution. Salmon fishing in my state has declined noticeably, acid rain has made a few park lakes too acidic to support game fish anymore, etc. I’m an avid fisherman and I have eyes.
If you don’t think that the human population isn’t putting a hurting on the rest of the world, including the oceans, you’re out of your mind.
What’s next? You’re going to tell us that cutting down rain forests doesn’t harm the environment?
It is really hard to make predictions about future economic behaviour and it’s concequences on the environment.
“Smaller fish” most certainly aren’t left out of the NOAA/NMFS surveys, nor are they left out of the NEMF surveys, which largely echo the ones required by law by NOAA.
I’m sorry that science bought and paid for by environmental groups, animal rights groups, and the sport fishing industry have got you worked up into a chicken little state of angst, but don’t blame the science.
Except this is a study based on one giant logical flaw, and a respected peer-reviewed journal should have pointed it out to good ol’ Dr. Worm.
His entire premise is based on the idea that if we continue the overfishing practices of the last 20 years, by 2048 the oceans will be denuded of fish. Fair point.
Thing is, we already have discontinued the overfishing practices of the last 20 years. When organizations who thrive on overfishing hysteria (like seaweb.org) have to grudgingly admit that the oceans are recovering and stocks and species populations are rebounding, you know something is up.
Think of it like this: you’re in a car driving for hours towards a cliff. As it gets closer and the serious consequences of continuing to drive that direction become clear, you turn the car and seek and alternate route that doesn’t have you driving off that sucker. 10 minutes later, some grave scholar in the car opines that if you continue driving in the direction that you had been for hours, you’d have driven off a cliff. Yeah, no shit sherlock. That’s why we did something about it.
(BTW, the UK and EU have enacted management programs that are even more stringent than regulations of the NMFS. Australia and New Zealand are on board now, too. The “rogue nations” of overfishing continue to be in Southeast Asia, China, and South America…but domestically these regulations have done an admirable job in creating a sustainable fishery in areas that were once thought to be irreversibly damaged.)
The actual study doesn’t predict that the fisheries will collapse in 2048. That notion is introduced in passing as an extrapolation from a simple linear regression, and the authors are presumably well aware that such extrapolations are usually grossly misleading. The major point seems to be a call for more regulation to preserve biodiverity, and there is much discussion of such efforts.
The study doesn’t seem particularly well-done or novel to me. Most of it is just meta-analysis of other studies, there are some pretty serious issues inferring causation from correlation, and the policy recommendations include no economic analysis whatsoever, despite the presence of a few economists in the (ridiculously long) list of authors. I don’t know how it wound up in a prestigious journal. The media seems to have picked up on the 2048 remark and, in typical journalistic style, ran with that rather than the important points the paper actually makes.
In other words: One study doesn’t make the future. There’s a ton of evidence against this and “Selective Harvest” has ALWAYS been the way to go with fish. It’s proven by the countless fisheries that it has been applied to. Commercial fishing doesn’t have that luxury and harvests everything in it’s net. Throwing back a fish that’s been trapped in the net for X amount of hours doesn’t count as a mortality UNTIL it comes floating to the surface later on, which I’m POSITIVE isn’t even included as a factor in this study.
FACT: STRESS KILLS FISH. PERIOD.
Letting them go to die later is one BLIND spot in most of these studies.
Regardless of whether we wipe out all ocean life in the next fifty years, we’re still possibly-irrepairably changing it for good. The fish we leave behind are the weinerfish of the sea - the natural order, insomuch as there is a natural order, is reversed. That’s pretty fucking serious, and we need to adjust. Now. Why not?
I mostly get pissed about deepsea trawling. It’s one thing to, say, cut down a rainforest - but doing blind sweeps of the ocean floor is like carpet bombing a populated alien planet. We haven’t the foggiest what’s down there.
Agreed.
It’s about time people started prefacing declarative statements with FACT again.
My GHOD do I love you.
In cows, or in people? In cows, it’s starting to crop up pretty regularly. In humans? It doesn’t show up with immediacy so it’s hard to know. There’s also a build-up effect at work, so the mere fact that we’ve started pruning out the crazy beef possibly means that we’ve stopped the potential cases that would’ve been.
I was referring to the kneejerk qt3 reaction during the Mad Cow story around Christmas, 2004, but if you wanna, I wanna.
“Pretty regularly”? I can’t speak for Canada or the UK, but you know how many cows have preliminarily tested positive for BSE in the US since that December 2003 downer animal? If you said “2”, you’re a winner. If we change the question to “number of persons diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob tied to eating BSE-infected beef in the last 5 years”, the number is less than 12, although there’s disagreement on the exact number between authorities.
If we narrow that list we realize that there still is no positive correlative between eating non-central nervous system tissue from BSE-infected animals and the onset of C-J.
Whatever the result, a person is more likely to be pecked to death by an angry chicken than contract and die from C-D tied to BSE.
NPR did a round table on this today (on Science friday…I think its sciencefriday.com if you want sources). Anyway, it left me ambivalent. On one hand, the people doing the study apparently used actual fish caught numbers rather than looking at stock. So, in American waters, that means that controls on fish volume would skew the numbers, which are not low because of low populations but because of max quotas and such.
OTOH, the study looked at worldwide numbers, so while the U.S. is doing a good job of conserving seafood, the world is not. There are also biodiversity issues in play, meaning that global warming, pollution, etc. is part of what they are figuring into their research. On a global level, numbers are down. So while restaurant owners in the U.S. might not be seeing the trends the study indicates, they aren’t seeing the whole picture.
So I think the study is unnecessarily alarmist, but it may not be wholly wrong either.
The main reason cows in the US are not testing positive is that they are not being tested. The cow in Washington that tested positive was not supposed to be tested according to the rules currently in place. Until you’re testing 100% of cows going into the slaughterhouse, you can’t make any claims about the meat coming out.
I’ma unload my load on this thread that triggercut seems to be pwning.
And that load is Quorn. It really does taste like the meat it says it is supposed to taste like, which is fricken scary.
Anyway, Quorn saves fishes. Eat it now!
EDIT:
Calls to end fishing by bottom trawling
Marine scientists say the case for a moratorium on the use of heavy trawling gear in deep waters is now overwhelming and should be put in place immediately.
It’ll be interesting to see what, if any, justification there is to continue a practice that strikes me as being basically equivalent to using artillery to slaughter a field of cows.