Lobster and snow crab fisheries search for alternative baits

https://hakaimagazine.com/features/is-sausage-the-missing-link-in-the-great-bait-debate/

by Petiver • 4 years ago

43 39 4 years ago

blakesterz• 4 years ago

Interesting, according to this In Canada’s Atlantic provinces, fisheries for lobster and snow crab are booming; in 2022, lobster prices reached record highs, and fisheries managers increased the quota for snow crab in some places by 32 percent.

But a couple months ago there was this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33207372

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

Quite a big difference between the 2 oceans for crabs.

purpleflame1257• 4 years ago

There was a big PNW heat bubble which it is suggested triggered a crab migration or die off.

mistrial9• 4 years ago

five hundred miles of old kelp forests off of Northern California coasts, also had a die off in a similar time frame.

makeitrain• 4 years ago

I wondered if the boats that aren't running in the Pacific got moved over to the Atlantic.

AlbertCory8• 4 years ago

"Using two pounds of bait to catch one pound of lobster just didn’t make any sense."

Apparently it made sense to the lobster fishermen. If the price of bait went up enough, then it wouldn't anymore. Or if using mackerel and herring as bait became illegal, it definitely wouldn't make sense.

bell-cot2• 4 years ago

In terms of sustainably feeding ~8 billion people in a finite world - "spending" 2 pounds of seafood (bait), plus all the overhead of fishermen / boats / fuel / etc., to get 1 pound of seafood (lobster) - that is far, far beyond mere batsh*t crazy.

AlbertCory8• 4 years ago

Apparently you don't have Skin In The Game, and the lobster fishermen do.

sannee• 4 years ago

On the other hand, humanity is spending several pounds of food per day on a generic programmer and all they have to show for it is some numbers shuffling around inside of a computer.

Turning less tasty food into tastier food at a 2:1 ratio honestly does not seem all that terrible in the big picture.

twelve40• 4 years ago

isn't lobster a delicacy and in nobody's wildest dreams can feed even close to 8 billion people?

bragr2• 4 years ago

In some sense, this is no different than that a huge portion of agriculture goes to feed farm animals. It does not make sense from a purely economic nutrition delivery perspective but since people have a preference for meat, especially lobster, people are willing to bear the cost.

AlbertCory8• 4 years ago

The "purely economic" perspective is why it does make sense to them.

Raise the prices of the baitfish, or outlaw using them. Do you have another method?

blfr• 4 years ago

Eating meat and other products from higher up the food chain makes perfect nutritional sense. Much more than optimizing for calories per buck which leads to a diet full of HFCS horrors.

TheDong• 4 years ago

Externalities are the thing that get you, and I think are what the article is obliquely getting at with that phrasing (and the "amid concern about the state of fish stocks" later).

Each poacher who kills an african elephant for the ivory is paid handsomely, and individually it perhaps makes sense to them, but it's illegal because the externality is that the african elephant would go extinct if we treated this purely as a market where "if someone will pay for ivory, that justifies it".

The health of the planet is usually not able to be factored into market economics.

Laws intervene, but ideally we would recognize the externalities and adjust our behavior _before_ laws come into play. We shouldn't have to wait on the law to limit carbon emissions to recognize that destroying the planet, even if it gives us more dollars in our lifetime, is a move that does not make sense for humanity as a whole.

I think the framing of the article is that this inefficient use of resources makes less sense from an externalities perspective, and you're saying that it makes perfect sense from an economic perspective.

xboxnolifes• 4 years ago

What are the externalities in this lobster example? It looks less like externalities to me, and more that people would rather pay $X for a pound of lobster than <$X for 2 pounds of lobster bait.

This is unlike the ivory example, where the externality is an entire species going extinct.

AlbertCory8• 4 years ago

Note that I did not say it was all a matter of economics. I'd love to see the ivory trade and rhino horn trade stamped out.

I explicitly said regulations might be appropriate, and since fishing is already heavily regulated, it needn't require a revolution in consciousness to extend it to baitfish.

nerpderp822• 4 years ago

It’s estimated that fish caught specifically for bait in Atlantic Canada and New England in the United States amounts to hundreds of millions of kilograms, but the catch is poorly tracked.

hundreds of millions of kilograms. mind boggling. What a waste of life and food.

Spivak• 4 years ago

The only thing that's wasted is the resources and effort humans spend in the process of doing the catching, the rest is the circle... the circle of life.

revolvingocelot• 4 years ago

It's even worse if you read about the overall effectiveness of lobster traps...

...I thought this was better-studied, but I can only find the one article sourced via wikipedia, so perhaps this isn't as certain as I've made it out to be, but traditional lobster traps are apparently so ineffective that the majority of lobsters that interact with them (to get at the bait!) handily escape. [0] From the lobster's perspective, maybe it's not a waste -- lobsters are fed by those kindly humans and their strange wooden boxes, and the slowest among them are eventually lifted into the heavens to an unknown fate.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20121117011028/http://www.usnews...

jandrese• 4 years ago

I can only imagine this breeding lobsters that are more effective at evading the traps.

mikeyouse• 4 years ago

It's discussed obliquely in the OP article.

As much as mackerel, herring, and other forage fishes underpin fishing in the northwest Atlantic, they serve an equally important role in marine ecosystems. Forage fish are part of the base of the ocean’s energy pyramid, consuming tiny creatures like copepods and, in turn, being consumed by humpback whales, puffins, and a whole host of other species.
Bait use has altered that food chain, with mackerel and herring turning lobsters, which would normally eat sea urchins and other bottom-dwellers, into fish eaters. Scientists have even hypothesized that because wily lobsters are so good at snagging a meal out of traps without being caught, the intensive use of bait can result in a larger lobster population than would exist otherwise. Yet until very recently, Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) did not track the volume of bait being caught. Many lobster and crab fishers have licenses to catch their own mackerel and herring, and the magnitude of that catch was not quantified. Much of the commercial catch for these species, which is measured, also goes to bait.

Mistletoe• 4 years ago

If we can’t even find the bait…do we need to be fishing for other stuff haha? The ocean food web can’t be right.

killion• 4 years ago

If we could get the lobsters to eat the purple sea urchins we could solve two problems at once...

https://www.npr.org/2021/03/31/975800880/in-hotter-climate-z...

WillyF• 4 years ago

There’s a TikTok account that shows up in my feed from a lobster fisherman with a series called “Will It Fish?” where he tests Baird suggested by his audience. I find it quite enjoyable.

Lobster and snow crab fisheries search for alternative baits

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