> The NOAA assessment estimated the Pacific sardine biomass will be at 27,547 metric tons by the summer – significantly less than the 150,000 metric tons needed to reopen the fishery to commercial fishing. Any fishery at less than 50,000 metric tons is considered to be overfished. The assessment estimates the sardine biomass was around 1.8 million metric tons in 2006.
Haha, damn. Fishermen must have visibly noticed such a decline. 1,800,000 metric tons to 27,000 metric tons. Two orders of magnitude. Wow.
When a fishery crashes, it is dramatic and takes a long time to recover if ever. There's been plenty of fisheries like cod that one could not conceive being depleted but it has been now for decades.
Estimates of catches, mortality, existing stock are prone to error because we don't really know much about how fish live and their overall population. But once that crash happens it is known and too late. Cod crashed in 1992 and still hasn't recovered
Yes, seen this happen in Tasmania, Australia with crayfish, scallops and orange roughy. Each went from free-for-all to highly managed quotas within a few years. Roughy fishing stopped completely back then, don't know what the status is now.
> we don't really know much about how fish live and their overall population
Absolutely yes. Orange roughy is a good example - it was caught by trawlers when they were massed in huge balls near the surface. Easy to get a big catch quickly. Turns out this was when they were spawning, so breeding cycle was being interrupted, which led to catastrophic declines very quickly.
My understanding is that the cod fishery decline in Atlantic waters has had limited recovery because the ecological niche that the cod fish occupied has been taken over to some extent by a small shark species. The wikipedia page mentions 'trophic cascade' so larger populations of prey species but does not mention the shark takeover. Either way cutting the harvesting won't bring the fish back.
> because the ecological niche that the cod fish occupied has been taken over to some extent by a small shark species.
That is very interesting, I wish this kind of things were taught in school. Too many people think that animals just exists in the current state for ever. When in reality it is a dynamic system that once changed cannot be brought back.
There are two sides to it. The other side is: what people consider current "balance of nature" is just a transient state. Species die off all the time, ecosystems last millenia and then suddenly collapse, then rebound and look completely different. Protecting the habitability of our planet is paramount, but overindexing on how any particular aspect of it looks at any moment is a fool's game.
Scale matters and modern humans drive species to extinction faster than the historical average by several orders of magnitude. Even if you value non-human intelligent life at zero, which I think is morally reprehensible but know plenty of others disagree, this kind of destruction has significant hard to predict impacts.
But from a purely selfish and human centered perspective we can also demand preservation just so that future humans also get to enjoy what the previous generations had. I wish humans didn't kill off the dodos! I want my grandchildren to be able to eat ocean fish. And I'm willing to reduce my own fish consumption if that means the fisheries live on into my grandchildren's times.
This is true of trees even. People think forests have looked the same for all time but trees are frequently pushing each other out of areas. Disease and pests play a huge role as well.
There's some amount of introduced pressure due to invasive species of both trees and pests but it's always been this way. Everything is in flux all the time.
Too many people think food grows on a grocery store shelf. If they've never grown a plant from seed and eaten the result, it is hard to internalize the reality of the supply chain.
Replying to my own post as well past edit timeout.
I can't find anything about niche occupancy replacement at all on the Web. Searches lead to information about the trophic decline in prey species after an initial boom when the North Atlantic cod went down to something like 1% of previous volume. Some mention of harp seals competing with younger smaller cod for available food (which is scarce now apparently).
Could be a case of a small effect earlier in the timeline masked by huge changes resulting from warming water &c.
To be fair, we used to catch decades-old (and probably centuries-old) gigantic cod. There hasn't been enough time to rebuild those giant predators back into the system, which has broad effects.
It's like clear-cutting an old-growth forest, and then replanting acorns. The forest simply won't return to anything like its original state for many decades - if ever.
And that's with management. Here on the east coast of Canada cod was a big industry and was managed by Dept of Fisheries and Oceans aka DFO. The problem was foreign fishing freezer ships just over the maritime border. They took whatever they wanted to and were no restricted even by their own countries. Canada almost went to war with Spain and Portugal we even sent warships to the area.
That's the scary part. By the time the data is unambiguous enough for everyone to agree the stock has collapsed, you're already dealing with the collapse rather than preventing it
Not all fishery crashes are the same. Alaskan sockeye had a huge crash in 2014 which was immediately followed by huge gluts in 2015-2017. Same thing happened last year after a terribly weak run in 2024. Important to look at specific facts and context
The overfishing situation seems dire across many species. I read that Mitsubishi is deep-freezing tuna in anticipation of its extinction. I don't know if that's actually their motivation, but they are definitely involved in tuna procurement.
I don't know about the future, but it used to be that sardines were a fish that was not over fished because they weren't that popular. Of course that could change.
Anecdote, not data: I picked up the habit of eating sardines from my Dad who is 97 years young. It's not that he doesn't eat bad stuff, its just that in my lifetime I see evidence that many of the things he ate were healthier than we thought.
"Cannery Row" in Monterey, CA, famous from John Steinbeck's stories set there (including an eponymous book), was initially a sardine fishery opened in 1902, peaked in 1946 at 142,282 tons, falling one year later to 26,818 tons. Most canning factories closed in the late 1940s and early 1950s. By 1973 the last cannery closed, and was no longer packing sardines but a mix of tunay, anchovy, and mackerel.
That's what happened to the Atlantic cod fishery. The biologists kept warning of collapse, the relevant regulators didn't want to piss off the fishermen, and didn't institute necessary restrictions, and then the fishery collapsed.
The fishermen, of course, blamed the dab gum gubmbent for getting in their business. Anything but taking responsibility for their actions.
And that is what remains of the Pacific sardine fishery. It used to be that sardines were plentiful all around Monterey, but during WWII fishermen used improved sensors to track down and remove all schools of sardines until they were gone. Since then attempts to reintroduce sardines to that stretch of California coast have all failed. This is a really huge loss to the whole ecosystem there.
It's a terrible picture almost everywhere you look.
The Antarctic krill population is facing a similar decline due to influencer marketing (promoting Krill as a superior omega 3 supplement). Sardines and Krill are the foundation of the entire oceanic food ecosystems. This is not good.
As terrible as the influencer scourge is for society, I somehow doubt that it was a 3 day social media fad a couple of weeks or months ago caused the collapse of ocean wildlife.
Portugal almost made some fisheries extinct, we had to severely curtain fishing and still sardines would show up in the markets. I think fishermen notice, but they’re also incentivised to continue fishing because the price starts going up?
You might consider how hunter-gatherers (probably) ate all the mammoths, and other elephant-alikes, and the giant kangaroos. I mean capitalism isn't crucial to making humans immoderate although I suppose it gets them better boats.
The book "not the end of the world" by Hanna Ritchie makes a neat point that humans have never lived in what we would call a sustainable way, but it's possible for this generation to be the first one that does.
How is that possible? At some point there were a small amount of humans and they probably were not able to consume resources faster than nature can replenish them
Nomads also live in those areas because agrarians pushes them out of more productive land. Prior to the development of agriculture, there wasn't such a distinction.
That was sustainable as long as they killed each other at the same rate as they reproduced, so they didn't fill all the available area. Civilized societies and medicine destroyed any chance of sustainability until contraception was invented. Now, only the pension funds propaganda keeps us from reaching a sustainable population again.
The main difference being the scale we can (and we do) bring species to extinction nowadays, even collaterally. Also nowadays we know exactly what we are doing, yet we press the gas pedal even harder to maximize shareholder value. So no, the comparison doesn't hold.
Capitalism explicitly wants to separate power decisions, e.g. "throw that man in jail" from money decisions, e.g. "consumer demand shows we should build more of widget X and less of widget Y".
Things like Communism, Fascism, monarchy want to combine them, so the government/leader has the power and the money decisions.
Capitalism only means unconditional private property rights in the means of production. It doesn't require separation of powers or anything else, it can and has historically worked great with fascism.
"Money decisions" are also absolutely power decisions. The power concentration isn't even mainly in the decisions of the rich, but simply in that they are rich. You need to work building yachts rather than bake bread because the yacht buyers have so fabulously much more money to spare than the bread buyers. And the money they don't spend is even more powerful since it controls society's investments. Our society orbits around wealth, that's what capitalism is in practice.
It has not worked well with fascism. You know that you basically had a gun pointed at your head, if you did not comply with the regime? To be able to keep your stuff, you had to collude with the system. And you had to be not jewish as well.
But they didn't have guns pointed to their heads. Every single time in history, they gleefully collaborated and even helped the fascists come to power in the first place.
And there are many examples of them being happy to join in. I think the best one right now is Alex Karp, Palantir CEO, who is actively rooting for and building the tools of fascism because it's so profitable.
> Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them.
> We’re going to partner with the world’s best people and we’re going to dominate. You can be along for the ride or you don’t have to be.
> Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.
> Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives.
> The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.
> We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?
> The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service.
This capitalist doesn't have a gun pointed to his, he instead feels a moral obligation to provide the state with a comprehensive surveillance apparatus and ability to kill enemies of the state while also decrying holding public figures accountable.
There are famously capitalist countries that are monarchies (like the UK), so as written that has to be wrong. There isn't really a definition of what "capitalism" means, although we can be fairly confident it involves people owning capital. Arguably it means that the people who own the capital should control the lion's share of political power (which, coincidentally, is how the US works).
The thing that makes communism (and fascism to a lesser extent) anti-capitalist are that it rejects the idea people should be allowed to own and control capital. So there is a clear incompatibility with communism even if the exact nature of capitalism isn't clear.
> Arguably it means that the people who own the capital should control the lion's share of political power
The ideology, such as it is, doesn't have to explicitly say that capital should have political power. It merely says that it's a moral outrage to prevent the rich from spending their money however they choose.
But the ideology is secondary to capital anyway. If we let the rich get rich enough, that's strong incentive for inventing ideological justifications for it; after all to be friends with the powerful gives an easy life, and to be their enemy give a hard one.
> The ideology, such as it is, doesn't have to explicitly say that capital should have political power. It merely says that it's a moral outrage to prevent the rich from spending their money however they choose.
But that's the same thing. Because having so much money to spend is (one type of) political power.
that seems a bit naive. you can think of it like that, but then you'll find actual practicing capitalists (not capitalism, the generalized concept) will always cozy up to centers of coercive power, until they're the ones weilding those coercive powers. you've basically reinvented the medieval distinction between the church and the secular authority. the church would never burn people alive, they just determine if a person is spreading heresy and the secular authority will do what it will.
in reality it's all one system and it exists in reality. the system that exists in theory is just a model to carry around in your head.
Correct. Capitalism is one of many different systems that degraded the environment. By contrast nothing else has really advanced humans.
Arguably capitalism is the first system to see environmental problems and try to solve them.
Arguably? Capitalism will crash and burn before it will solve any env problem. May I remind you that without NASA (not a private entity) and without gov regulations (not industry self-regulation) we wouldn't have an ozone layer today.
Modern capitalism was invented in 2020 with the abolition of bank reserve requirements. The previous incarnation was invented in 2008 with the start of QE Infinity. There were probably a few between that and the one that started in 1971 with the abolition of the gold standard, and so on.
Well, it is very lean meat, most similar to chicken IMO :-D
They do have the best livers.
Unfortunately in the US I can only find them from fancy suppliers that are way overpriced. But if I were going to raise something in the backyard, it would be cuy...
oh well, data centers are far more important than the world's food supply. now get off the internet and back to making more gigantic diesel generators.
> The NOAA assessment estimated the Pacific sardine biomass will be at 27,547 metric tons by the summer – significantly less than the 150,000 metric tons needed to reopen the fishery to commercial fishing. Any fishery at less than 50,000 metric tons is considered to be overfished. The assessment estimates the sardine biomass was around 1.8 million metric tons in 2006.
Haha, damn. Fishermen must have visibly noticed such a decline. 1,800,000 metric tons to 27,000 metric tons. Two orders of magnitude. Wow.
0: https://www.seafoodsource.com/news/environment-sustainabilit...