Lobster and snow crab fisheries search for alternative baits
hakaimagazine.com
hakaimagazine.com
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.
That bait (herring) is food to a whole lot of people. It has been overfished to support lobster farming, it was taken at cost from the commons to develop a food that few can consume.
Turning less tasty food into tastier food at a 2:1 ratio honestly does not seem all that terrible in the big picture.
They’re expensive largely because of the infrastructure required to keep them from going bad.
Raise the prices of the baitfish, or outlaw using them. Do you have another method?
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.
This is unlike the ivory example, where the externality is an entire species going extinct.
Because [1] says that mackerel are of "least concern."
> Despite its highly commercial status, the Atlantic mackerel is listed as Least Concern by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and global catch has remained sustainable.
Now, for herring: [2]'s most recent date was 2010. However, Google says:
"Is herring being overfished? Image result for are herring going extinct Population Status. According to the 2022 stock assessment, Atlantic herring is overfished, but not subject to overfishing. Summary stock assessment information can be found on Stock SMART. Herring populations are naturally highly variable."
[3] says "U.S. wild-caught Atlantic herring is a smart seafood choice because it is sustainably managed and responsibly harvested under U.S. regulations."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_mackerel
But OK, I went back and reread it. I found one unsupported statement:
"But Atlantic mackerel and some populations of Atlantic herring have dropped to a fraction of their former levels. Many stocks are now in the critical zone—meaning that serious harm is likely occurring to the stock—and in some cases, have been that way for decades."
And yet, I cited some authoritative data from agencies that are in a position to know. Those agencies say the species are not endangered.
So I think it's your move.
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.
https://www.npr.org/2021/03/31/975800880/in-hotter-climate-z...
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.
hundreds of millions of kilograms. mind boggling. What a waste of life and food.
...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...
So you might also be breeding lobsters that get pregnant more often and value traps as food?
> 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.