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Comment by xutopia | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

> 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

In previous collapses such organizations sounded the alarm well before. Something else is happening.

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

The alarm has been sounding for at least a season, maybe even more.

By contrast cod that folks keep referencing collapsed 90% over _30 years_. An issue with a single season does not suggest that the regulations weren't strict enough. They now do need to become more strict as a reaction to the population but fishing is not the only pressure on a population and I find it difficult to believe that snow crab would be fished basically to extinction in < 700 days

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.

At least the urchin problem is caused, in part, by the mysterious sea star wasting disease - a disbiosis of their microbial layer that leads to rapid death. Sea stars are the natural predators of the urchins, and with their disappearance, the urchins flourish and take down the kelp.

> Sea stars are the natural predators of the urchins, and with their disappearance, the urchins flourish and take down the kelp.

No problem. We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the urchins.

Sea urchins are a problem everywhere in the pacific, and that's because their main predator (sea otters) were nearly wiped out.

I think it's just the western coast of North America that has this problem, rather than the entire Pacific. For example in New Zealand, which is in the Pacific, there were never any sea otters. Urchins, regarded locally as a delicacy, are not particularly abundant.

Crown-of-thorns starfish, on the other hand, are a very serious problem in Australia

Things that are easy to imagine aren't always easy to prove

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

It's still worth investigating, however.

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?

Thank you. The problem with a lot of the discussion around this topic is that most people are heavily biased as they derive great pleasure from consuming these animals, and so certain ideas and theories are ignored or under represented.

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.

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.

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.

Some people don't want to hear that because it's counter to their world-view. Earth isn't warming. Everything is OK. We can continue burning fossil fuels while having zero impact to the environment. Is there a word describing this mass wishful thinking?

That mass wishful thinking is call “climate change denial”.

We keep adding more and more evidence that climate change is happening. Even on a local scale we can all see significant changes in our local climate from year to year. The older among us can see this even more clearly if they chose. From what we know of the atmosphere there HAS to be heating from the rapid increase in CO2.

You can stick your fingers in your ears as much as you want but it won’t prevent this from happening and at an accelerating pace.

Also the solutions being pushed kind of suck for most people. We’ve had 50 years of sustainability and eco-asceticism. Denial is a perfectly fine reaction to the solutions being proposed.

A dollar a gallon tax on gasoline would be more than enough to capture the CO2 it releases.

Other energy sources are similar.

These costs are way below what happens when some oil producer throws a tantrum or starts a war. However, unlike wars, etc., such a tax would directly cut into oil company profits.

Your crazy if you think the government isn't going to just piss that money away. Its already at ~$.50 a gallon with federal and state taxes. And the oil companies will just stop producing to lower supply and inflate the price. More taxes are going to hurt the individual , companies have enough money to get around it. No, we need a revolution.

The same people who get pumped up by football games and tailgaters, war epics, and 'badassery' and doing stupid but 'brave' things like shooting fireworks out your ass, are the same people who will deny anything that's 'too scary' not to.

Or attribute it to "God's will" and then still assume he'll take care of things so they can just go on ignoring the issues.

Reminds me of the cowardly lion who could talk a big game,but was inwardly afraid of everything. Even xenophobia and racism --it's ALL rooted in fear of 'others' fear of this. Politicians know damn well the power of fear, and have used it w/ great success to stay in power and keep left/right workers divided on stuff like abortion/gun rights.

> Is there a word describing this mass wishful thinking?

An existential threat to all human life.

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.

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.

> "We are eating bait and moving on to jellyfish and plankton", [University of British Columbia fisheries scientist] Pauly said.

http://articles.latimes.com/2006/jul/30/local/la-me-ocean30j... (https://web.archive.org/web/20161010003945/http://articles.l...), p3

Thank you for sharing those, esp. the one about Lyngbya majuscula blooms.

Here is an article that highlights this change. Just scroll the pictures, don't need to read the words.

https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/02/05/257046530/b...

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.

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.

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