As ocean oxygen levels dip, fish face an uncertain future

https://e360.yale.edu/features/as-ocean-oxygen-levels-dip-fish-face-an-uncertain-future

by myshpa • 3 years ago

184 146 3 years ago

e360.yale.edu

I tried to get newspapers to report on it and they kept telling me they already covered ocean acidification.

moffkalast3• 3 years ago

Iirc the research regarding what kind of emotion evoking news gets most attention shows it's mainly awe and anger. Sadness doesn't get you very far, so there's a direct incentive to not report on any collapse related stuff we can't really do anything about anymore, since it won't get shared at all.

Could spin it as an angry piece condemning the fossil fuel lobby, but that probably gets you cut off the next time there's a burning oil rig to report on.

mandmandam2• 3 years ago

that probably gets you cut off the next time there's a burning oil rig to report on.

More likely, the money from the expensive green-washing ads they buy is cut off.

Anyway, I'm sick of profit motive being an excuse for media complicity in atrocity.

Apofis• 3 years ago

Aside from Ocean Acidification, uncontrollable Algae Blooms, and Melting Sea Ice, we now have Ocean Deoxygenation on our plates. We also have unprecedented droughts on land as well. Humans really will be the next mass extinction event on this planet. So incredibly selfish.

throwanem2• 3 years ago

"Will be?" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

jauntywundrkind• 3 years ago

Acidification is the unavailability to carry hydrogen molecules.

The primary hydrogen carrier in water is oxygen.

Are deoxygenation & acidification different problem, or different slants on the same problem?

rolph• 3 years ago

deoxygenation, and acidification are two different phenomenon, they may influence each other but are not obligated.

im very much inclined to say these are not problems.

these are symptoms of a larger scale problem, namely an atmosphere pushing thermal bounds beyond global buffering capacity,

and CO2 accumulating beyond biospheric buffering ,and regulation.

titzer2• 3 years ago

You forgot microplastics.

johndevor• 3 years ago

Just unlock gen 4 nuclear.

TheOtherHobbes• 3 years ago

I don't think there has ever been a time in all of human history with so many existential threats.

Between catastrophic climate change and resource depletion, AI, the danger of nuclear war, COVID and other potential pandemics, economic insecurity for most of the population, and farmed irrational extremist political movements, we seem to have quite a lot to deal with.

Might as well just have Carrington Event 2.0 and be done with it.

pirate7873• 3 years ago

Actually, the world has never had greater economic security than it does in 2023.

goatlover• 3 years ago

COVID was never an existential threat. I'm not aware of any pandemic being that, even smallpox or the black death. Where existential means threatening the existence of the human species.

bruce511• 3 years ago

I know I being picky, but nuclear war is the only existential threat there.

It's unlikely that any pandemic would make humans go extinct. Covid showed that isolating population groups is possible, especially if bounded by water (Australia, new Zealand etc). Mass death sure, but not extinction.

Climate change will probably reduce livable spaces (although people already live in extremes like Alaska and Sahara) but humans are adaptable and certain parts will still be temperate. Again huge impact, but not existential.

Sure there's a lot of "other stuff" going on, but honestly it has always been thus. Two world wars for example caused several daily concerns for most of Europe, and much of Asia. Throw in revolutions in Russia and China, and independence for India, plus the technology booms, and life in 1950 was different to 1910.

I could write a whole comment on economics, but again a 2 year blip in inflation (it's down again now) is not going to end anything. Given the economic improvements in Asia over the past 50 years (China, S Korea, Japan, Vietnam etc) "most" of the world is better off than before. There's a long way to go, but its been an upward trend for a long time.

brutusborn12• 3 years ago

I don’t think any of these are really that critical: they will become a problem in a few centuries if we do absolutely nothing but will likely be fine.

Take ocean deoxygenation: it happens locally due to fertiliser runoff in places that have a history of low oxygen. It’s good to put some resources towards fixing this, but it’s not useful to think of it as an extinction level problem that we “now have.”

AtlasBarfed2• 3 years ago

Wow, you have the entirety of the world ecosystem, from deep ocean currents and biology, to the entire 70% of the world's surface oceans, to the jungle rainforests, arctic/antarctic ice, atmospheric changes, solar radiation variation, historical records, 100% accurate computer simulations/predictors, all nailed down?

All the interaction of species, effects of (mass) extinctions? Invasive species? Habitat destruction, soil loss from farming, AND you can predict the impacts of human industry, economics, and technology change?

You have ALL THAT NAILED DOWN, internet expert?

Forgive me if I don't take your assurances about that as being "no big deal" with any iota of reliability.

There are literally 20 major scientific domains that all are in lockstep agreement about anthropogenic global warming, from geologists, atmospheric scientists, basic chemistry and physics, oceanographers, biologists, archaeologists, historians. A massive collection of scientific inquiry that basically all ends at the same conclusions. It's quite literally thousands of PhDs, maybe tens of thousands.

Of course, all of them don't know as much as you, internet guy.

myshpa18• 3 years ago

Take ocean deoxygenation: it happens locally due to fertiliser runoff

Two types, not one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_deoxygenation#Types_and_...

beachy• 3 years ago

Atmospheric CO2 has increased by a third just since I've been alive.

It's difficult to overstate just how quickly we are destroying the planet.

I spend a lot of time snorkeling and I tell my kids to really take in what they see because it probably won't be there when they're parents themselves.

brutusborn12• 3 years ago

I think it’s good to encourage appreciation, but no need to exaggerate risks.

IPCC predicts existential risks to marine ecosystems at temperatures much higher than today. Your child will probably be able to go snorkelling just fine as an adult. My local coral reefs have returned to health after a major bleeching event that was predicted to be the beginning of the end. Sometimes our catastrophic predictions are wrong, or exaggerated.

https://www.aims.gov.au/reef-monitoring/gbr-condition-summar...

crazygringo• 3 years ago

Good lord. I thought you were exaggerating but indeed, up by a third since 1958:

https://www.co2levels.org/

I consider myself pretty aware of climate change but I suddenly realize I've never actually looked at the direct numbers. That's scary.

thriftwy• 3 years ago

How is that solar shade coming along?[10]

hyperbovine• 3 years ago

A solar shade would merely vault acidification ahead of anoxification on the shitlist of horrible things we're doing to our oceans.

ChrisArchitect• 3 years ago

Weird this was syndicated onto BBC also

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36236444

sbierwagen• 3 years ago

They've been doing it for a while: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Abbc.com+%22This+artic...

saagarjha• 3 years ago

Good. They should tough it out and grow a pair—of lungs, that is. Living in an aquatic environment has made all the fish grow soft. Time to evolve like the rest of us did.

(More seriously, warm ocean dead spots affect more than just fish: I suspect we’ll see a further decline in marine mammals too, for example.)

jfghi• 3 years ago

Free market solves it /s

petre• 3 years ago

Actually some fish living in anoxic environments have adapted to breathing air. Betta fish and Corydoras come to mind.

ChatGTP2• 3 years ago

Looks like we are the paper clip optimising narrow AI we’ve all been afraid of after all…

We don’t make paper clips though, we’ve optimised to make money and turn everything into it.

So ashamed to be part of of it,

throwanem2• 3 years ago

Many science fiction authors have made surprisingly incisive contemporary critiques in the forms of allegory and metaphor. Bostrom is unusual mainly in that he doesn't seem to know when he is doing it.

stevenwoo2• 3 years ago

Asimov’s The Gods Themselves description of economics reads sort of like Onion headlines of today but from fifty years ago.

ASalazarMX• 3 years ago

We've optimized so hard we can make money out of negative money.

aaron_m042• 3 years ago

I'm starting to accept that we are done for. The only thing that gives me hope is that maybe some alien civilization out there in the universe successfully avoided this great filter.

titzer2• 3 years ago

The Earth seems to want to evolve towards a giant tropical rainforest and keeps getting smacked by one disaster after another. This time it's just an infestation of apes that will knock out some unknown chunk of life and probably gobble up and pave over half the surface before collapsing under its own weight.

stevenwoo2• 3 years ago

Speculative fiction of Lilith’a Brood by Octavia Butler comes to mind, it was good but so bleak I had to stop in second book.

noduerme2• 3 years ago

I think we're a little better than that. No one actually wants a world where everything is turned into financial statements. The tragedy of the commons is a bug, whereas wholesale conversion to paper clips for Clippy is a feature.

ChatGTP2• 3 years ago

So I think we are this, even if we don't want to be. We just don't have the (whatever it is) to not do it.

I think where we've made the mistake was deferring everything to technological solutions, which arguably created the problem in the first place.

This is not to say technology won't help, or even eventually solve it, but we should work harder on the people and governmental problems.

ClumsyPilot5• 3 years ago

We don’t make paper clips though, we’ve optimised to make money and turn everything into it.

Paperclips are at least real objects.

Money doesnt even exist if everyone isndead, its not real.

netsharc• 3 years ago

I just had a curious realization.. Money is a representation of trust, it says so on the dollar bill, that the piece of paper can be traded for something at the US treasury, and we all trust this to be true. Indeed "credit" means "trust". So I wonder if we've been wanting to collect bigger and bigger amounts of "trust" because, hey, who doesn't like being trusted? And funny how people can't see when just looking at your briefcase or bank account full of money if you got your money through scamming people (exploiting their trust), so indeed this decoupling has been harmful (if you're a decent guy but you're homeless, people don't look at you twice, if you're Elon Musk people treat you nice...)

NovaDudely10• 3 years ago

There is a great podcast series called 'The Great Simplification' by Nate Hagens. It is basically just a series of interviews with people about the predicaments of our times. Nate has been working on this theory of 'the great simplification' being a coming event when our monetary systems catch up with the ecological systems that actually govern our world. That there is a lot of credit embedded within our very monetary system that cannot be redeemed long term.

That we have issued credits for energy and materials that we cannot actually claim at the volumes needed.

It is a compelling idea and that looks fairly plausible. Nate does a great job of walking the fine line between pessimism and optimism, something which Cory Doctoro describes as both side being defeatist.

over_bridge• 3 years ago

Line go up.

Everything else can be sacrificed as long as the line keeps going up (GDP, stock market, revenue, profit, share price - take your pick). No politician will risk doing anything that makes the line go down even if it boosts 'non line' metrics like happiness, health, social connections, free time, any environmental measures, home ownership, min wage)

NovaDudely10• 3 years ago

This is a point Daniel Schmachtenberger has argued. We worry about rouge AI's and the paper clip optimizer problem and yet that is essentially the path our current economic system operates on.

cwkoss2• 3 years ago

I think a (dis)info campaign touting the toxins and pollutants in fish could be a major environmental win. Humans have destroyed huge amounts of ocean life, and with fish populations already devastated, climate change is going to push many species over the brink to extinct.

I feel like - even if requires pseudoscientific explanations or bald-faced lies - it would be a net good for the world if people thought there is a chance eating fish could kill them. Alarmism over heavy metal accumulation happening at increasing rates, fish absorbing pesticides and poisoning people, stuff like that. Idk if it's happening, but I feel like it would be good for the environment if people believed that.

(disclaimer: i don't enjoy the flavor of fish anyways, so my cost-benefit of this is different than most peoples.)

myshpa18• 3 years ago

No disinformation campaigns are necessary.

Fish do indeed often contain heavy metals (mercury, lead, cadmium, arsenic, copper), PCBs, dioxins, and furans, as well as microplastics.

Young dolphins are dying because the mother's milk may be poisonous for the same reason.

https://phys.org/news/2018-12-toxins-mother-young-european-d...

Banned toxins passed from mother to young in European dolphins

https://www.poisoningchildren.com/blog/2014/02/05/bioaccumul...

Bioaccumulation and Dead Baby Dolphins

"Because female dolphins off-load most of their toxic exposure to their first-born calf, their levels after sexual maturity are lower than males; but a very high percentage of first-borns die"

"It is not astonishing that native women in the Arctic Circle, who eat high levels of marine mammals, pass these chemicals on to their babies with dire effects"

"Childbirth and breastfeeding are some of the few ways the body can rid itself of persistent chemicals. It is usually still best to breastfeed, but children who are breastfed continue to inherit the mother’s exposures, as shown in a study of testicular cancer in Denmark and Finland"

Btw, human and cow milk has similar problems.

cwkoss2• 3 years ago

Ah, so just needs an awareness campaign! Even more of a clear moral win then if it doesn't require deception.

(also, yikes and tragic)

skeaker• 3 years ago

At that point it would be better to supply the demand for fish with fish farms where they are bred to be eaten rather than pulling fish from the ocean. You could (truthfully) advertise as environmentally friendly, you would probably turn a profit, you actually would have fewer toxins than ocean fish, and ocean fish would be proportionally fished less. Much more straightforward of a process than conspiring/bribing countless people to spread disinformation and giving credit to conspiracy theorists.

myshpa18• 3 years ago

Still few problems with this.

- intensive fish farming can lead to environmental issues, such as water pollution from fish waste, excessive use of antibiotics and chemicals, and the depletion of wild fish stocks used for fish feed

- some farmed fish species require a substantial amount of wild-caught fish to produce a relatively small amount of farmed fish

- the conversion of natural habitats like mangroves and wetlands into fish farms can lead to habitat destruction and loss of critical ecosystems that support various species

- in densely packed fish farms, diseases spread rapidly among fish populations, leading to mass mortality events. The use of antibiotics to control diseases can also contribute to antibiotic resistance, posing risks to human health

- introducing non-native or genetically modified fish into local ecosystems can disrupt the balance of the ecosystem and lead to unintended consequences

We have to switch to plant based diets.

It seems to me that nothing else will stop the environmental destruction, in this case overfishing, which alone threatens us with empty oceans in 2040's.

And it would solve the problem with warming oceans too.

Rapid phase-out of fossil fuels, together with a switch to a plant-based diet, would free up a land area the size of Africa. When reforested, this area would store so much carbon that we'd be able to store our entire 1.5C carbon budget in those forests and initiate a new "little ice age."

nashashmi2• 3 years ago

The oxygen drop is driven by a few factors. First, the laws of physics dictate that warmer water can hold less dissolved gas than cooler water (this is why a warm soda is less fizzy than a cold one).
Melting ice adds fresh, less-dense water that resists downward mixing in key regions, and the high rate of atmospheric warming at the poles, as compared to the equator, also dampens winds that drive ocean currents.
Finally, bacteria living in the water, which feed off phytoplankton and other organic gunk as it falls to the seafloor, consume oxygen. This effect can be massive along coastlines, where fertilizer runoff feeds algae blooms, which in turn feed oxygen-gobbling bacteria

NovaDudely10• 3 years ago

So there is this idea that we can reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere by using iron seeding into the ocean causing a massive amount of phytoplankton production. But would the side effect of this be a drop in ocean oxygen levels?

myshpa18• 3 years ago

It's imho always better to let the nature do the job. Just stop interfering.

rcme3• 3 years ago

No it would increase ocean oxygen levels. CO2 in the atmosphere would become O2 in the ocean and carbon in the phytoplankton. Until the plankton decay, of course.

DoctorOetker2• 3 years ago

As water heats, the solubility of solids (salts, sugars, etc.) goes up.

As water heats, the solubility of gases (O2, CO2, etc.) goes down.

Humanity coming from initial blissful ignorance about CO2 emissions eventually became concerned about rising atmospheric CO2.

Most emitted CO2 was actually being absorbed by oceans. This also makes the ocean acidic.

So the oceans acted like a "landfill" buffering a large amount of CO2 emissions.

Consider a duplicate earth, where Carbon is added to atmospheric O2 oxygen molecules. As long as its surface waters are not saturated with CO2, it can buffer a large fraction of the resulting CO2, with an equilibrium constant between aqueous CO2 and atmospheric CO2. At a certain point this "CO2 landfill" or rather "CO2 seafill" saturates. Assuming for simplicity a constant CO2 emission rate, thus without increasing the rate of CO2 emission, atmospheric CO2 rises at an initial rate (slower than CO2 emission rate, since a large fraction is initially absorbed by the ocean surface waters); until surface waters are (near) saturation, at which point atmospheric CO2 starts rising at a much higher rate since the surface waters no longer absorb significant amounts of CO2.

If one then desparately and miraculously succeeds in somehow halting continued excess CO2 emissions, the globe will still heat due to the added atmospheric CO2, also heating these surface waters, decreasing gaseous solubilities, resulting not just in aqueous O2 depletion but also sadly in "CO2 blowback": the large fraction of CO2 historically dissolved in the surface waters turns back into the atmosphere, even though miraculously excess antropogenic CO2 emissions were halted!

From a "carbon credits" perspective, where players are traditionally viewed as nations and corporations, surface waters rear their head and releases the historical CO2 debth.

nashashmi2• 3 years ago

Excess CO2 in surface water causes algae and phytoplankton blooms that feeds back into sealife. The CO2 is not being released once the water warms. Rather the waters are becoming more acidic and therefore "tastier".

swsdsailor• 3 years ago

I am very interested in using tech to help the ocean. Does anyone have ideas for technical solutions to this?

peteradio• 3 years ago

In the movie biodome they picked up all the cigarettes and made a kickass air filter. Presumably something like that might work.

hedora• 3 years ago

I think the best bet is to figure out how to get desalination plants to also scrub CO2 and lithium from seawater. With government subsidies, it might actually turn a profit, and we'll need to do all three of those things anyway.

(Scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere would also work, but would take longer to address ocean acidification.)

myshpa18• 3 years ago

We would need an immense number of such factories. Just lookup how much is already in the atmosphere, and how much are those technologies able to capture.

This is a feel-good technology, something to placate the population that something is being done.

We have better factories. They're called trees.

myshpa18• 3 years ago

Yes.

1. stop overfishing by switching to plant based diets

2. stop fishing ... even fish we don't fish, but decimate (as bycatch) will rebound

3. stop fishing ... there won't be as much plastic to entangle fish, mammals and turtles (49% of great pacific garbage patch is fishing nets)

4. stop animal ag ... minimize agricultural runoff from farms and fields to stop creating dead zones in the ocean

5. stop animal ag ... use technology to reforest pastures and store all excessive carbon in them

6. reform agriculture ... use technology to improve ag methods and improve our soils, storing even more carbon in them

7. stop fossil fuels

8. give nature time to repair itself

9. enjoy healthy ecosystems, saved for future generations

Or explain the scorched earth to your children.

000ooo0004• 3 years ago

Cool. That sounds tough, though. Do you have any solutions where I can do nothing? How about innovation? /s

chmod775• 3 years ago

1. stop overfishing by switching to plant based diets

Switching to fish raised in fish farms in the open ocean / fresh water fish raised in farms (which are often local) should already be a large improvement, even if it isn't optimal, especially right now when those captive fish are fed fish caught in open waters.

Also hope you like mussels and clams, because raising those in farms has little ecological impact and might actually reduce net CO2 by sequestering it in their shells.

tlb• 3 years ago

Ocean electrolytic deacidification is interesting. CO2 dissolved in the ocean makes it more acidic, which disrupts marine biology and slows down further CO2 absorption. You can extract acid from ocean water using electrolysis, raising the pH back to natural levels. This requires energy input, but could be more cost-effective than direct CO2 capture. It may be able to pay for itself by selling the acid for industrial use.

https://www.ebbcarbon.com is one company building it.

the_third_wave2• 3 years ago

How did fish manage during the climatic optimum [1] some 8500 to 5500 years ago when it was between 1.5°C and 4°C warmer than it is now, let alone during the previous interglacial periods [2] which were markedly warmer than the Holocene (i.e. the current interglacial period)? If there was a marked reduction in ocean life due to reduced oxygen levels that should be visible in fossil records. If there was no such reduction then why would there be one now?

Increased CO₂ has led to a markedly "greener" planet [3] - the increase was enough to cover the US twice in vegetation by 2016. Those plants produce oxygen during photosynthesis (6 CO₂ + 6 H₂O → C₆H₁₂O₆ + 6 O₂) which is released to the environment (air or water) during daylight hours leading to a higher oxygen concentration. I suspect this balance between higher atmospheric CO₂ which leads to an increase in vegetation which then leads to an increase in oxygen production is what kept ocean life from succumbing due to oxygen deprivation during those periods when the average temperature was much higher than it is now. If this happened then, why would it not happen now?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_climatic_optimum

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_glaciation#/media/F...

[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3004

thulle• 3 years ago

How did fish manage during the climatic optimum [1] some 8500 to 5500 years ago when it was between 1.5°C and 4°C warmer than it is now

From your wikipedia link:

---8<---

A study in 2020 estimated that the average global temperature during the warmest 200 year period of the HCO, around 6,500 years ago, was around 0.7 °C warmer than the mean for nineteenth century AD.

The HCO consisted of increases of up to 4 °C near the North Pole (in one study, winter warming of 3 to 9 °C and summer of 2 to 6 °C in northern central Siberia).[8] Northwestern Europe experienced warming, but there was cooling in Southern Europe.[9] The average temperature change appears to have declined rapidly with latitude and so essentially no change in mean temperature is reported at low and middle latitudes.

---8<---

So, the effect then was localized to the waters where there's more oxygen anyway, and having temperature going in different directions in different parts of Europe and at a much slower rate than current changes, would make it easier for the fish to migrate? Unclear how water temperatures behaved at different depths though.

the_third_wave2• 3 years ago

The same is true for the current warming where the largest increases are seen in the northern winters so that does not affect the comparison.

Instead of picking on one section in a Wikipedia article it would be interesting to know what exactly is different "this time" compared to earlier warmer periods, both the climatic optimum as well as e.g. the Viking and Roman warm periods, let alone those during earlier interglacials. Just stating "now it is different" is not very convincing.

kuhewa5• 3 years ago

How did fish manage during the climatic optimum [1] some 8500 to 5500 years ago when it was between 1.5°C and 4°C warmer than it is now

It was not 1.5—4 °C warmer. Mean air temperatures around the peak of the HCO were less than 1 °C elevated relative to preindustrial temperatures and were below last decade's mean air temperature. And those aren't ocean temperatures. Regionally, surface waters around the great barrier Reef was ~1 °C elevated relative to modern day.

Anyway, the answer to your question is the rate of change since was much slower than recent temperature /pH changes. Populations, even sessile ones like corals can more successfully redistribute and move toward the poles to find optimal thermal conditions with a slower rate of change. And we are also putting the ocean under a few other confounding stresses like overfishing, eutrophication, acidification, coastal development and habitat loss, etc, which is novel territory relative to previous climactic shifts.

Also I'll note what might be a blip in the geological record in terms of fossil richness could still have profound consequences for species on which we depend on for economic livelihood and food security, e.g. say you have a well managed fishery harvested at close to maximum sustainable yield. If conditions change such that the environment rapidly shifts to support only 80% of the original carrying capacity due to growing OMZs, the fishery now needs to be managed such that it will support a lot less jobs and produces less food (or, mgmt doesn't adapt and the stock gets severely overharvested, and then the job and production loss necessarily follow).

I suspect this balance between higher atmospheric CO₂ which leads to an increase in vegetation which then leads to an increase in oxygen production is what kept ocean life from succumbing due to oxygen deprivation.

The article mentions why this suspicion is wrong. In fact, proliferation of the main oxygen producing taxa in the ocean is one of the primary mechanisms that exacerbates oxygen minimum zones. Phytoplankton blooms, then dies, sinks, and get eaten by microbes that consume oxygen.

ClumsyPilot5• 3 years ago

99% of the time when people ask "how did ancient people manage to live without doctors", or whatever, you will find out that they didnt manage at all.

Life did not manage sudden changes of climate, there yave been 6 mass extinctions. 99% of spieces that have ever existed are now exticlnct and we are on an express to join them

amateurCoder5• 3 years ago

The climatic optimum you refer to was cooler than today. From the wiki you reference:

A study in 2020 estimated that the average global temperature during the warmest 200 year period of the HCO, around 6,500 years ago, was around 0.7 °C warmer than the mean for nineteenth century AD, immediately before the Industrial Revolution, and 0.3 °C cooler than the average for 2011-2019.

a2tech2• 3 years ago

My friends who are fishery people (biologists) are all pretty sure we've doomed commercial fisheries in the ocean. It's too late to recover and no one really wants to fix the issues.

Enjoy your seafood while you can because they think they'll be gone before our generation dies out.

pirate7873• 3 years ago

They are already growing fish meat in labs, hopefully that and farming will take some of the pressure off the wild fisheries.

losteric• 3 years ago

Lab grown beef has sure had a major impact on clear-cut ranching

NovaDudely10• 3 years ago

The single biggest issue with lab meat is the lack of an immune system. Once we crack that then there is a real chance of this stuff working out. That said until then, I will just avoid all meats. If I have those cravings, the alternatives we have now are reasonable enough to scratch that itch even if not the same.

kuhewa5• 3 years ago

Perhaps your friends work in a region like the GOM where anoxic zones are a substantial and growing issue or regions where management remains poor so the sentiment would be accurate for their domain, but it isn't even close to holding true globally for all fish stocks, neither effects of low oxygen nor overharvesting etc. There were big improvements in stock assessment and fisheries management around 15-20 years ago and many formerly overfished stocks are on a positive trend since [1]

[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1909726116

a_bonobo• 3 years ago

While Ray Hilborn is one of the biggest (most publishing) voices in academic fisheries research, others absolutely hate him: Greenpeace calls him a 'overfishing denier' https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/research/overfishing-denier/

As part of their investigation into our appeal, the journal also posted a correction noting that several authors of a paper defending the Marine Stewardship Council were actually employed by the MSC – and Ray Hilborn had received funding from certifiers employed by the MSC. Small victories, perhaps, but in an era where we need strong scientific advice more than ever, we cannot afford to have research clouded by undisclosed conflicts of interest.

a2tech2• 3 years ago

North Atlantic, Great Lakes, African great lakes, and northern Pacific. Lots of hand waving about improvements but the people who I know that work directly with it and have dedicated their lives to studying such things say the opposite.

bmitc• 3 years ago

I feel this is going to be a pattern more and more common. It already has been increasing for decades. We have royally messed up this planet and its ecosystems.

anonuser123456• 3 years ago

By then we will be 3D printing fatty toro sashimi w/out the mercury.

MichaelNolan• 3 years ago

Might not be a long wait. At least one company (wildtypefoods) is making lab made salmon and they specifically are targeting the sushi market.

29athrowaway• 3 years ago

By then we will be inside cans of soylent green.

000ooo0004• 3 years ago

Mass fish death: "won't someone think of the fisheries!"

Mass fishery death: "won't someone think of the seafood!"

We deserve this

NovaDudely10• 3 years ago

Pretty much. While I am but one of 8 billion people, all animal products have been off the table for a long time now. Part adaption to the future, part protection of what we have today, part ethics.

NovaDudely10• 3 years ago

It is in the book 'Dark Age America' by John Michael Greer, he does make mention of this that any one reading that book and is still fairly young, there will be a day when they have their last bit of seafood.

That is one of those books, you hate that his vision of the future looks so plausible.

It is a shame that in recent years he went full an anti-vax with Covid even though he explained why that kind of thinking had issue in that very book. He has also started engaging in bizarre conspiracy theories about a lot of things.

pierat2• 3 years ago

As ocean oxygen levels dip, fish face an uncertain future

"An Uncertain future"? Seriously? The word you're looking for is "death".

No sense in couching climate disaster in metaphorical soft words. There is going to be death, and a whole lot of death of all species, including humans.

000ooo0004• 3 years ago

The shareholders believe alarmist language is best avoided

gmerc• 3 years ago

This will do us in a handful of years. if you think there’s enough ship to push people migrating to places where they can still get protein back into the ocean or flimsy border fences will stop things, you’ll be in for a surprise.

more_corn• 3 years ago

What are the implications for phytoplankton?

As ocean oxygen levels dip, fish face an uncertain future

Related Stories