Alaska snow crab season canceled after disappearance of an estimated 1B crabs

I suspect the difference between you and those being sanctimonious to you are that they lie about their indiscretions. They probably have cars or pets or don't live in dense residential areas.

ilamont2• 4 years ago

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.

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.

starik362• 4 years ago

Looks like this article was written in 2008. I wonder if the population has rebounded in the last 15 years at all.

PuppyTailWags2• 4 years ago

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.

beefman• 4 years ago

Great song about it by Finest Kind (sadly not properly available online): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX6dJgmof0E

uxp100• 4 years ago

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.

tromp• 4 years ago

to prevent economic losses and massive unemployment

So sad to see how easily long term catastrophic damage is justified by short term gains.

Tozen• 4 years ago

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.

Sakos• 4 years ago

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.

jjr8• 4 years ago

Climate change (warming waters) has been directly implicated in this (edit: Gulf of Maine cod) situation.

https://doi.org/10.1126%2Fscience.aac9819

dfc• 4 years ago

How is a 90% decrease in two years similar to a 93% decrease over 30 years?

llbeansandrice3• 4 years ago

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.

mickdeek866• 4 years ago

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.

sdenton4• 4 years ago

Any chance that trawling caused significant decline due to habitat damage, regardless of actual by catch tonnage?

ilamont2• 4 years ago

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.

Curious: What is your line of work in Alaska?

wlkerboh• 4 years ago

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.

SergeAx• 4 years ago

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?

dzhiurgis• 4 years ago

This happened two years ago, do you recon it could be related?

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/10/07/asia/russia-kamchatka-tox...

kaba0• 4 years ago

Overfishing

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.

goosedragons• 4 years ago

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.

TheFattestNinja• 4 years ago

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.

pxmpxm2• 4 years ago

Non-sequitur, but I love that I get this sort of first-hand color on a niche industry on HN.

xutopia• 4 years ago

The overfished. Simple as that. Snow crabs have been becoming smaller and smaller because the biggest ones were not living that long anymore. It happened to cod fisheries in eastern Canada and it is happening everywhere until it's too late.

oesexe• 4 years ago

COD, the fish that changed the world. Amazingly well written book.

Apparently Cod used to be MUCH larger than it is today. for the same reason, they dont grow very old.

nemo44x• 4 years ago

Many fish were much larger in the not so distant past. Marlin in Caribbean used to be huge compared to todays catch. Pictures from the 1950's and earlier, you see some just massive Marlin. They're big today but nothing like how they used to be. But we have a whole lot more people on the Earth today.

chaxor• 4 years ago

This likely isn't true due to the scale of disappearance of crabs.

*90% of the are gone - in only 2 years* That's not just overfishing, something much worse has happened.

The cod overfishing was also a very unfortunate tale, but they saw the signs and tracked them catching fire and burning to the ground the entire time, just didn't do anything about it.

Here, AFAIK, they were bewildered at how this occured.

jobu• 4 years ago

Other sources I've seen are blaming the dramatic heat during the summer of 2019. It "scrambled the broader marine ecosystem" causing die-offs and migrations for many species of fish. Snow Crabs are primarily deep water scavengers so they had plenty of food that year, but have struggled since.

whyenot• 4 years ago

No, it's not that simple. The snow crab fishery is pretty highly regulated and considered to be sustainably harvested (by NOAA, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, others). As mentioned in an another article [1] from August on the recent disappearance, there were large numbers of juveniles in 2018 and 2019. Something else is going on. Overfishing certainly may play a role, but something else is likely the primary factor.

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/21/alaska-cr...

insane_dreamer• 4 years ago

considered to be sustainably harvested (by NOAA, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, others)

maybe they considered incorrectly, based on historical data that doesn't reflect recent conditions

also possibly that regulations are being flaunted by bad actors

it could seem improbable that either of those would lead to a sudden catastrophic decline, but many systems do experience a point where what had been a linear decline suddenly craters in a non-linear fashion

hedgehog• 4 years ago

I don't know much about snow crab but Dungeness and various oysters in the Pacific Northwest US are threatened by rising ocean acidity caused by increased CO2. Warmer water is also allowing green crabs to take hold. Farther south urchins have killed off a lot of kelp forest in a way that seems not to self-correct. Easy to imagine there are similar problems all over the ocean.

WalterBright3• 4 years ago

Wildlife populations are a chaotic system, i.e. not steady state, even without any influence by humans.

It's still worth investigating, however.

marcjuul• 4 years ago

Absolutely not an expert here and would love to be corrected but my poorly informed personal impression is that the whole idea of a sustainable amount of fishing and whether all species even have a number that is safe to harvest (especially given that no species exists in isolation), let alone what that number is, is on fairly shaky grounds scientifically. Meaning that a lot of this is guesswork based on too little information and "doing something is better than doing nothing" compromises with the fishing industry. If a species population has appeared to be stable for x number of years with y amount of fishing, does that mean that it's sustainable? Indefinitely? Given other changes in ecosystem and environment?

barkingcat2• 4 years ago

https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/2021/10/09/alaska-snow-crab-...

Notice that this article is from 2021 for last year's catch.

"The 2021 fall harvest of Bristol Bay red king crab, another important source of revenue for that fleet, was canceled for this year because of too few females."

The collapse has been happening for years. This year it's just another species. Species by species it's going to collapse. Next will be shrimp and krill.

Don't be surprised when the salmon runs collapse too, because for 3 years now every single year has been a 90% decline.

melling• 4 years ago

Yes, “the climate is always changing”

Those “alarmist”.

People certainly do blame climate change when they shouldn’t, adding to the denial problem.

But in this case 90% disappearing in 2 years probably isn’t overfishing.

mattpallissard• 4 years ago

Nothing with fisheries is simple.

https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/preliminary-sur...

Also, a lot of people are comparing this to the Canadian DFO's handling of the Cod fishery. Sorry, this is not like that. Both in time line and management style. This fishery was just shut down, it's had its numbers slashed previously as well. In the Cod situation they had their foot in the accelerator until the very end.

mattw2121• 4 years ago

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.

cluoma• 4 years ago

At the Whitehorse dam we also had one of the lowest counts of Chinook on record this year. Not looking good for northern sea life at the moment.

reaperducer• 4 years ago

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.

raydiatian2• 4 years ago

Cthulhu

UnpossibleJim• 4 years ago

I just assume Douglas Adams got it wrong and it's the crabs that left instead of the dolphins =P

raydiatian2• 4 years ago

“So long, and thanks for all the detritus”

melony• 4 years ago

They had their neurons uploaded into Slavic machine learning systems. Stross wants his lobsters back!

irrational2• 4 years ago

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.

gremlinsinc3• 4 years ago

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.

cmsj3• 4 years ago

"billions who subsist on seafood will now have to eat eggs, pork, beef"

There is another possible outcome... :/

firstplacelast• 4 years ago

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.

suzzer99• 4 years ago

Did anyone else read this is 18 crabs and wonder what the heck was going on?

celestialcheese• 4 years ago

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.

Source: Family commercial fishes in AK

pgrote• 4 years ago

The Seattle Times joined followed a carb boat in April of 2022.

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.

DFHippie• 4 years ago

carb boat

Heh heh. I imagine fishermen hauling in a net full of potatoes and pasta.

60secs• 4 years ago

A bread bowl with a propeller

dotancohen• 4 years ago

Interesting. I imagined fishermen hauling in a net full of choke springs and accelerator pump gaskets.

LtdJorge• 4 years ago

I understoo it as carburated boat at first, so no wonder climate change is coming from it, lol.

8bitsrule2• 4 years ago

Damn fine journalism ... hope Hal got a bonus for it!

oxfeed65261• 4 years ago

https://archive.ph/Szsae. Good article, thanks.

guywithahat2• 4 years ago

I don't like how they keep blaming climate change, even though that doesn't seem to be what happened here. We just had one of the best seasons for crab fishing; does CBS expect us to think climate change in the last year ruined this season? Much more likely is disease, some new techniques in crab fishing that over harvested the sea, or random deviation.

nharada• 4 years ago

"Larger statistical variance caused by climate change results in outlier event that kills 90% of crab" isn't a great headline. What do you need to believe that climate change is a factor in this event? A sample size of 1 million? A deviation of 5 sigma?

guywithahat2• 4 years ago

This is my point though. Over the last 110 years the US has gone up about ~1'F https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...

This, in theory, changes every aspect of life by some amount, however minuscule or large it may be. In the case of king crab fishing though we haven't really seen a downward trend. What we've seen is some really good seasons, new techniques, and now very few fish. People like to explain everything away due to climate change but it seems more logical to me this is random deviation or the result of new technology or bad practices by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Assuming this follows a normal distribution we would expect a shortage of crab by over 2 standard deviations in 50 year intervals (or after ~25 years of beginning our recording), and below 3 standard deviations if we repeat this 20 times. We could explain this away perfectly fine without invoking climate change

taylodl2• 4 years ago

Global warming also contributes to the proliferation of disease.

carapace• 4 years ago

Check out Dana (Donella) Meadows Lecture: Sustainable Systems (Part 2 of 4) - 2013

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuIoego-xVc

mcwone• 4 years ago

Thank you for posting this, what an amazing lecture.

disqard2• 4 years ago

I watched it too. Thank you!

darth_avocado• 4 years ago

I am willing to bet it is illegal fishing boats from countries I dare not to list for being downvoted. It is well known that some countries list a few hundred boats but in reality have fleets of tens of thousands of boats that operate under the radar. They over fish and destroy entire ecosystems and no one is doing anything about it.

krastanov• 4 years ago

But China is overfishing in the public, not "under the radar", and they usually only go up to someones territorial waters, do not completely cross. Moreover, I very much doubt they would dare do so to a semi-powerful western state, let alone the US. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/insider/a-clear-look-at-c...

ROTMetro• 4 years ago

I remember chilling north coast of Santa Cruz late one night after a surf sesh, and boats pulling up to shore, unloading people and other items. This was right about when (was it Golden Budda?) in Soquel got busted for smuggling chinese machine guns? Sure they cross territorial waters.

(Man I was bummed. They had the best hot and sour soup.)

Edite:

Yep, it was Golden Buddha

https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Smuggler-of-Chinese-arms...

pphysch• 4 years ago

Or there are corrupt fishery regulators who are giving wild overestimations of fish population in return for kickbacks from fishery associations/cartels.

If it was the Big Bad, there would be political uproar. But if it was good ole corruption, it would be business as usual.

woodruffw3• 4 years ago

Do you have any evidence to back this up, or is this just xenophobic speculation?

China’s encroachment on sovereign waters for fishing is one thing when it’s against South American countries with small navies; it’s another thing entirely when it’s the US. I doubt they’re behind this.

vnchr• 4 years ago

Is it xenophobic when your own comment cites that exact behavior?

logicalmonster3• 4 years ago

Why are you assuming that the poster is hinting at China when his comment didn't mention the country?

stjohnswarts3• 4 years ago

China is by far overfishing all over the world compared to other countries. I doubt the Alaskan crabs are a result of that though. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/aug/25/can-anyo...

Supermancho• 4 years ago

They over fish and destroy entire ecosystems and no one is doing anything about it.

That's not just hyperbole, it's flat wrong. Some organizations try to do things about it, even if the methodologies have historically been ineffective. Nobody would be able to completely solve it, while the Oceans are still largely uncontrolled.

https://www.canada.ca/en/fisheries-oceans/news/2022/06/gover...

stjohnswarts3• 4 years ago

If there were enough boats out there to reduce the population 90% in two years then we would know. Our radar isn't -that- bad.

paxys• 4 years ago

"Disappearance" is a weird way to say overfishing. It's not like someone cast a spell or something.

anigbrowl• 4 years ago

They could have died from the crab equivalent of a deadly heatwave. I agree fishing is the most likely reason but I can think of others.

glonq2• 4 years ago

Next season on Discovery's Deadliest Catch:

Sig and Wild Bill learn how to knit.

gremlinsinc3• 4 years ago

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.

glonq2• 4 years ago

/me runs off quick to trademark "lab crab"

tzs• 4 years ago

Sig went to fish in Norway, and Discovery is covering that [1].

[1] https://www.discovery.com/shows/deadliest-catch-the-viking-r...

gmd63• 4 years ago

Bubbles don't just happen in finance. They happen in biology.

harveywi• 4 years ago

Possibly the same estimated 1B crabs that disappeared from Twitter when the Elon Musk deal was announced.

jcynix• 4 years ago

Overfishing? Remember sardines and Cannery Row in Monterey? Today it doesn't look much better, it seems:

https://www.montereyherald.com/2020/11/03/the-sardine-war-hi...

outworlder2• 4 years ago

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.

thr0wawayf00• 4 years ago

No idea, but I see more plant-based food in our future generally. It's gotta be way, way cheaper to farm crops than fauna and farm-raised seafood comes with it's own issues with mercury, etc.

onlyrealcuzzo• 4 years ago

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.

cmsj3• 4 years ago

Yeah for sure. Lion could well be 10x more delicious than beef for all I know, but I'm quite certain we couldn't farm millions of lions.

shagie• 4 years ago

It's possible.

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

pcurve• 4 years ago

oh man, that mud crab video is wild!

Looked into this more.

"in aquaculture farms, post-nursery crabs reach marketable size and maturity in 6–7 months compared with 18–24 months under natural conditions"

opportune• 4 years ago

I did a decent amount of research into this a while back. They (blue crabs) can be grown in captivity, but they’re cannabalistic, so they have to be kept apart from each other. This makes it pretty inefficient and high overhead. The crab farming operations I’ve seen literally have each crab in its own little compartment - this is too labor intensive to be feasible outside of places with very low wages like the Philippines and Indonesia.

If someone can figure out how to keep crabs in large pens without them eating each other, they will make a lot of money. I’m not sure if that’s possible with selective breeding. Maybe we need to wait until crab legs can be “printed” or grown in a lab

01100011• 4 years ago

but they’re cannabalistic

Seems like a place where GMO organisms might make sense. You just have to knock out this behavior somehow.

WalterBright3• 4 years ago

Overfishing is a classic problem of "Tragedy of the Commons". The oceans are the commons.

For example, nobody is predicting a catastrophic decline in the population of pigs, chickens, and cattle.

Fish farming is the future.

myshpa4• 4 years ago

Veganism is the (only logical) future.

Spivak2• 4 years ago

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.

Luc• 4 years ago

Or meat and fish from bio reactors.

rewgs• 4 years ago

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.

ElijahLynn2• 4 years ago

Truth.

hayst4ck7• 4 years ago

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).

sudosysgen2• 4 years ago

Unlike the US+the West, China will never be able to be world police.

akira2501• 4 years ago

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.

boomchinolo78• 4 years ago

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

Sporktacular• 4 years ago

Given its environmental record and susceptibility to lobbying, the US is not in a good position to police this issue.

Whether anyone is can be debated, but must there be only one sheriff?

klyrs• 4 years ago

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.

ijidak• 4 years ago

Overfishing is a classic problem of "Tragedy of the Commons". The oceans are the commons.
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.

kennywinker2• 4 years ago

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.

JumpCrisscross3• 4 years ago

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.

drks91• 4 years ago

On other news, Soviet Union destroyed the Aral Sea trying to grow cotton in the desert.

pGuitar• 4 years ago

They often feed the fish in farms with wild fish... it's a joke, currently.

steve_adams_867• 4 years ago

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.

formerkrogemp• 4 years ago

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.

dathinab• 4 years ago

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.

verisimi• 4 years ago

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.

avgcorrection4• 4 years ago

Tragedy of the Commons is a fallacy.

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…)

vore3• 4 years ago

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.

IIAOPSW• 4 years ago

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.

darraghenright• 4 years ago

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.

djmips• 4 years ago

"Hope and pray." - yeah that'll solve it!

WalterBright3• 4 years ago

If I was prez, I'd reserve a number of offshore "national parks" where no fishing of any sort is allowed.

twawaaay• 4 years ago

You know, the difference is that marine animals travel a lot more than land animals.

wiredfool• 4 years ago

Oddly enough, there’s decent evidence that preserves that ban fishing are effective for preserving the biodiversity in the larger region that includes zones where fishing is allowed.

underbluewaters• 4 years ago

Search "Marine Protected Areas", they are definitely a thing. US Presidents also have a habit of designating Marine Monuments as they exit office.

cmsj3• 4 years ago

Maybe it was the crab rapture?

wonderwonder2• 4 years ago

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.

Maursault4• 4 years ago

I'm just curious what percentage of HN members diets is snow crab, and my point is snow crab isn't corn, wheat or chicken, and the only people this is going to affect are the snow crab fisherman, their families, and the economy of the towns in which they live and spend.

eclipxe• 4 years ago

10% of mine

Maursault4• 4 years ago

That seems like a lot. More than once a day? Or the only thing you eat every 10th day?

andy_andy_andy• 4 years ago

i think the takeaway of the story isn't specifically that this season's snow crab season is cancelled, but that a population has collapsed because of some combination of climate change or overfishing. even if you don't eat crab it's bad news when 1 billion crabs go missing.

Maursault4• 4 years ago

it's bad news when 1 billion crabs go missing.

It's shocking, and yet not all that surprising.

shakezula• 4 years ago

This is a super shortsighted view. Every life form in the ocean plays a role in the ecosystem and catastrophic damages like this have first and second order effects all over the place.

Maursault4• 4 years ago

I'm pretty sure my point was the only reason for harvesting snow crab is that it is lucrative for these fisherman, yet snow crab isn't an important staple of any diet, so there was absolutely no compelling societal reason to fish them into population collapse or extinction, not even greed. My suspicion is the majority of the product here was wasted, rotted and discarded, so we should really put pressure on commercial fishers in the US and abroad to find another way to support themselves in order to stop them from killing everything in the ocean rather than romanticize a way of life that is economically and ecologically unsustainable, such as is inexplicably done for ranchers, nor should we frame them as sympathetic victims of climate change.

gdubs• 4 years ago

It's relevant to all of us because it's yet another data point regarding how we live on this planet and what it's doing to ecosystems.

baskethead3• 4 years ago

I mean is there any mystery here? It's China. China doesn't care about anything except for themselves.

Hundreds of Chinese fishing boats set up just outside of international waters in South America and fished everything in the area and brought it back to China. It's like a sick game of Age of Empires but millions of people are affected.

artificial2• 4 years ago

The fleet is big enough to be seen from space. Neat animation of some activity here [0] and AP story https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB6-bAF9B8A

baskethead3• 4 years ago

As far as I'm concerned the countries impacted by those fishing cities should quietly torpedo them. It's a crime against humanity and if China can't support their own population with food they create themselves, they should cull their own population, not selfishly create famine for other countries by overfishing everything they can get their hands on.

jandrewrogers• 4 years ago

This doesn't pass the sniff test. The US has the most capable and dominant naval presence on the planet and they use it. Nothing happens near their territorial waters without their permission and they see it coming long before it happens. The "ghost fleet" fishing incidents -- which are a real concern -- happen to countries with minimal maritime defenses.

You can blame China for many things but this definitely isn't one of them. Episodic fishery collapses are a thing that occurs naturally aside from fishing activity, and the Alaskan fishery is one of the best managed in the world.

1270018080• 4 years ago

If your first thought is always "there is a grand conspiracy plotting against american interests" you need to come back to reality.

vonwoodson• 4 years ago

Yo’ Mama so fat that…

hannasm• 4 years ago

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?

greenyouse• 4 years ago

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.

[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...

Manu403• 4 years ago

My current employer was just talking about how the cost of seafood is rising because of things like this.

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.

DoingIsLearning• 4 years ago

Yeah the price of seafood is the real problem here, the canary is dead but lets keep digging deeper, things are bound to improve.

Manu403• 4 years ago

Heh, I get the joke.

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?

beowulfey• 4 years ago

In the northeastern US this past summer the price of lobster was maybe 30% higher than previous years (in my area anyway)

Manu403• 4 years ago

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...

alliao• 4 years ago

how old are the crabs when we harvest them? if they have long lifespan then it'd take just as long to turn the tide

padjo• 4 years ago

“In a major blow to America's seafood industry…” - says it all about how incredibly messed up our priorities are.

black_puppydog• 4 years ago

I "like" how the beginning of the segment states the "biggest impact" is gonna be on the fishing economy, not on the restaurants.

I'd argue the biggest impact is on... the crab population? Guess nobody really cares for those after all. In which case losing them serves us well.

philosopher1234• 4 years ago

We are like coal to be burned as fuel for capital

tenpies• 4 years ago

Not quite. That is the carbon cycle.

We just came along and put some faces on paper so we could stop killing each other over whose fishermen get to catch crab. Then we called it capitalism and pretended that our economic systems transcend natural science.

moffkalast• 4 years ago

This kills the crab

Sargos• 4 years ago

I'd argue the biggest impact is on... the crab population?

The biggest impact of a lower crab population is a lower crab population. That's tautological, makes no sense, and why the article doesn't mention it. The decline in population already happened.

tsol3• 4 years ago

To be fair, news on the economy gets more clicks than news about falling animal populations. Just another perverse incentive that makes the system the way it is

fredgrott• 4 years ago

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.

rex_lupi• 4 years ago

Overfishing, climate change, Corruption (US NOAA). See this thread: https://twitter.com/Unpop_Science/status/1581660239501283329

Tucanix• 4 years ago

The Kraken ate them.

Alaska snow crab season canceled after disappearance of an estimated 1B crabs

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