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mkl

Yeah, that's why I don't buy fish.

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You're ahead of the curve, soon nobody will be able to.

Lobster population is actually exploding as a result of global warming.

Real beef hamburgers are the food we will probably have to say goodbye to first.

Where is lobster population increasing due to warming?

Where they catch them?

https://qz.com/506376/lobsters-2/

Thanks, it makes sense... I remembered some recent alarmists headlines about how lobsters will decline in the area due to warming but forgot that it was warming in the first place that made it the sweet spot it's currently.

Edit: anyway, production in the US has doubled in the last 20 years but the increase in global production is less than 50%. So it has not "exploded" in all the places where they catch them.

Maybe I'm just falling victim to corporate propaganda, but I'm pretty sure wild (Alaskan) salmon is truly sustainably fished, as are sardines and anchovies

There are good ways to check:

US: https://www.seafoodwatch.org/

UK: https://www.mcsuk.org/goodfishguide/search

Both have mobile apps I believe.

The Alaskan fishery is much like the fishery south of it in BC, where 'sustainable' is a bit of a joke - I think that term is based on taking a 'sustainable' number of the estimated population returning to spawn in rivers. Alaskan rivers are doing better than BC's, but returns are dwindling and both governments are consistently shifting baselines on a yearly basis. Every year quotas are smaller, but so are the populations.

This is something I follow constantly and the numbers are actually terrifying. Some rivers have okay returns of some species of salmon, but some like sockeye are at incredibly low numbers. They are by some measures on the brink of extinction, and many spawning runs are extinct already.

In BC, sockeye returns are currently being tracked daily and the result so far is that less are returning than ever before, and the amount returning is far less than the department of fisheries and oceans' lowest estimates. It's an emergency in my opinion. People shouldn't be eating sockeye.

I'm not sure about sardines and anchovies. I know herring have been seriously overfished, so I have doubts that anything we fish is sustainable at the moment. I hope it is.

I thought there was a glut of sockeye a year or two ago? I remember seeing it everywhere.

Every now and then there are bumps in the size of the return (typically every 4 years, which is why the 4 year average is more meaningful to determine population health), but with salmon it isn't a very strong indicator of anything other than that spawning was more successful than usual or disease and predation were reduced while the salmon were maturing in the ocean. It has very little long-term bearing on population growth or stability, unfortunately. I'm not sure but I suspect a couple years ago was probably a normal, predictable spike. People get excited about it nonetheless.

Another thing to consider is that what we call a glut of sockeye these days is still a paltry return compared to what was once possible. 100 years ago, before a certain landslide occurred in one of BC's major rivers, our largest returns were estimated to be almost 40,000,000 fish. This year, we're seeing around 600,000 fish. We were expecting 4,800,000.

Thanks for sharing numbers. I wasn't aware. If you look at any form of wildlife though 100 years ago it's not comparable to today. Any other type of fish, oysters, bear, moose etc.

It's true, it's maybe a poor comparison to make. I guess you could compare it to the late 80s - we had a significant collapse across all salmon populations and it's not even clear why yet. There hasn't been a stable recovery since then, and overall the downward trend is continuing.

Something fascinating about this is if you look up the conservation status of the pacific sockeye salmon, it's Least Concern. There certainly are some populations in some rivers that are doing better than others, but the overall trend is a steady downward pattern.

I don't know much about fish or live near the Pacific, but neither of the links in my comment (sibling to yours) suggest sockeye is a bad choice. In fact NE Pacific 'early summer' sockeye is a recommended choice, and many BC sockeye fisheries have MSC certification.

I know there's certification, but if you look for BC's department of fisheries and oceans' minutes on the sockeye return, it's dire. As I mentioned, it's well below their lowest estimates. Their lowest estimates for this year are even lower than previous years. I've been following this for 7 or 8 years, and while there are years where the return is better than previous years... It's still not a good return historically speaking. The sockeye are disappearing.

This year it's not clear why numbers are so low, but a sound guess would be that the generation spawning this year's returners were largely impacted by pre-spawn mortalities. Numbers look good going into the river, but they end up dying before they can spawn. Research into this phenomenon isn't well-funded, but it's a known problem.

Even the farmed ones? Do you eat meat at all?

Unfortunately, fish farming is currently not generally sustainable either, for other reasons, e.g. https://modernfarmer.com/2015/03/dear-modern-farmer-is-fish-...

Yes, I eat some meat, but fish is a special case as it's the only major source of meat that's from wild sources, and those sources are being exploited beyond sustainable limits much of the time: https://www.worldwildlife.org/threats/overfishing

Farmed meat on land can have major environmental costs in terms of resources, but at least we can see what those costs are. With fish, we're destroying ecosystems we don't even understand.

That fish farming sustainability article seems highly suspect to say the least, they're complaining about GMOs and such being "unsustainable" which is ridiculous. If anything GMOs are more sustainable in many ways, higher yield for less land, better targeted pesticides, etc.

I'll have to look into it more, there's a few different agencies certifying "sustainably farmed" fish at the moment which seem to be readily available around here at least.

I think you may be incorrect about GMOs actually being more sustainable, as they have a pretty major effect on biodiversity by encouraging higher use of pesticides and insecticides[0]. A great example is the effect they have had on the population of monarch butterflies, mentioned in the linked source.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_food_co...

From that link: "A 2014 meta-analysis covering 147 original studies of farm surveys and field trials, and 15 studies from the researchers conducting the study, concluded that adoption of GM technology had reduced chemical pesticide use by 37%". Scrolling further down shows more citations showing lower use of pesticides, insecticides and herbicides.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_food_co...

Right back at ya' from the same link: "Some doubt still remains on whether the reduced amounts of pesticides used actually invoke a lower negative environmental effect, since there is also a shift in the types of pesticides used, and different pesticides have different environmental effects."

Again, read the monarch butterfly example, where higher rates of Roundup usage has killed milkweed all over, reducing habitat/food for the butterflies.

Fish farming is a spooky rabbit hole to look into. All kinds of species, from saltwater to fresh, crustacean to finish, are fed fish that were caught in the wild, fed piles of antibiotics (this part gets really concerning, the implications for water sources connected to the farms are terrible), and all kinds of manual systems for removing polluting farm waste are employed where the pollution simply moves from farm to surrounding ecosystems.

There are better systems that are more sustainable, but my understanding is that most tilapia (for example) you'll find in a freezer at your grocery store is probably produced this way. It's really gross. Farmed shrimp and prawns are another one to stay far away from - they're labelled sustainable, but the farming practices are absurd. I don't trust any sustainability labels, anywhere.

Another one is Atlantic salmon farmed in the Pacific Ocean. That stuff is so gnarly. There's a reason British Columbia is shutting down a lot of these farms (and reviewing the remaining farms in 2022). It's bad for the environment, the product is not healthy, and it's incredibly inefficient. Yet somehow this product was labelled the smart choice for years.

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