U.S. moves to increase minimum legal size of commercial lobster | Hacker News Reader

U.S. moves to increase minimum legal size of commercial lobster

cbc.ca

57 pointsgeox68 comments

I think the US is doing the right thing here. Lobster populations are going down so regulations are being enacted to limit harvesting.

Lobster isn't exactly a staple food anyways. I have it maybe twice a year in a sushi roll or sandwich, which is probably more often than your average North American.

It's not exactly a staple food for you, is what you mean.

I know plenty of people in fishing communities that eat lobster at the same rate you may eat hamburgers or pasta. One of my close friends growing up had a lobster fisherman father, and they ate it once a day. That and deer/moose meat was the staple food.

Edit: The goal of this comment was not to say that this is incorrect, I am for this change. My goal was just to say I feel there are places where it is staple. That's it.

Ok, but this has to be a pretty small minority, right? What percentage (or absolute numbers) of people do you think eat lobster daily, or even weekly?

I guess the real question is how many people matter. Is it 1 million that we care about? 50k? 10k?

Lobster is a food item, just because it is now treated as a special food item on special occasions does not mean everyone does.

In the context of sustainable lobster populations, total consumption is the only metric that matters -- not distribution of consumption frequency.

I think they mean it's not a staple food for the population as a whole.

I agree, it's a small amount. But you can't paint broad strokes like that. What we consider staple foods is completely different then China, Africa... The world is much larger then Canada and US.

Do you agree or disagree with the following sentence?

Lobster is not a staple food for the majority of the world's population.

I agree.

Is there any food, I wonder, which is a staple for the majority of the world's population?

I think the biggest contenders are chicken and bread

yes. rice (70% of people consuming as a staple food.) wheat. corn. potatoes. maybe cassava too.

I thought rice must be the most likely, but wasn't sure where to look it up.

I would hope that people who treat lobster as a staple food might appreciate what happens when the stocks collapse.

Surely you see that Amiga OS is not a popular operating system, even if the creator used it daily.

Amiga, much like the lobster, is criminally underrated.

Lobsters are overrated. They're bottom-feeders that in the US were originally only considered food fit for slaves, prisoners, and pigs, or as bait and fertilizer. Lobsters are intelligent creatures that feel pain. The way lobsters are boiled alive and kept starving in tanks at grocery stores and restaurants is gross. Also they're ugly.

This is the weirdest mix of repping for lobster's rights but still shitting on them at the same time. Has real "we should euthanize all the pugs" energy but honestly I'm here for it

I suspect that as long as one's father remains a lobster fisherman, one will have lobster daily.

> Lobster isn't exactly a staple food anyways.

It used to be prison food.

Related and worth the read: https://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf

You are gettign a lot of flack about the staple food comment. I don't think its even necessary.

If its a wild caught species there is very little expectation to factor that in. Perhaps you can bifurcate the model between commercial and hobby fishers but not much more.

When I was in Massachusetts I went to a museum with an exhibit on the history of the fishing industry. At first they hunted whales near the surface, until there where no more whales in the Atlantic. There was actually a map diagraming how each year the whaling fleet needed to travel further and further south. Then it was cod. Then halibut. And now lobster. Overt two centuries, the industry systematically cleaned out species in order from sea surface to sea bottom.

we had finished blue tuna in Atlantic and Pacific Ocean, too

Lots of focus on the fishing industry I'm that article and not on the fact that sea life populations are collapsing.

The Canadians are complaining that they will have to catch less lobsters, but that is exactly the reason for the new legislation.

It is working as it is intended and as it should.

Maybe an AI overlord can solve the tragedy of the commons

I for one would welcome a benevolent AI dictator.

The problem is not usually the benevolence of the first dictator, but the benevolence of the 15 that come after.

We just need to make sure that the AI doesn't select it's successor from its children.

We already have that in Europe, it's called "strong government regulation" and it's great at certain tasks

Americans would rather have AI overlords than strong government regulations. /s(?)

Yes, like they prefer self driving cars over trains !

I think most people would prefer traveling alone in their own compartment and directly to their destination (and having a personal vehicle when arriving there), all else being equal.

And utterly terrible at many others (source: am European too)

Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

That sounds like it would lead to an Evitable Conflict.

For those who want to eat sea food despite declining population numbers. Gordon Ramsay did a piece on how global warming was causing king crab to move north into former colder waters where they destroyed the ecosystem by reducing fish stocks and caused their numbers to balloon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6ff-ShY5Bw

The takeaway being we should eat more king crab? That's the kind of activism I can get behind!

No, the takeaway is that we are abusing the ocean causing ecosystem collapse.

A takeaway needs to be actionable. That's kinda the whole point. If there are too many king crabs, we can action on that by making their removal economically favorable.

I'd be curious to hear what the people downvoting my comments think the author was implying in their comment, which so far as I can tell is saying the exact same as mine just less bluntly.

A takeway just needs to be memorable. Actionable is nice, but not a requirement. "We can't do anything useful in this situation" can be a valid takeaway, as can "we do not know enough at this point."

In this situation, my takeaway is that we do not know enough, and that's what I understood the parent's post to be saying.

Removing the surplus crabs might help, it might set off another chain of poorly understood events.

Lobsters in the gulf of Maine are fed A LOT of herring as bait. Like 70,000 tons a year. Hard to say what the overall result of this is. More lobsters? Less Herring?

Some lobstermen joke that they feel more like ranchers then fishermen.

https://www.wellsreserve.org/writable/files/Goldstein-Shield...

The smaller lobsters are tastier (little known secret). I typically go for 1lb or 1 1/4 lb when everyone gets google-eyed at the 1 1/2 lb or bigger ones.

But most lobster gets processed, and is not consumed whole. In that case I am all in favor of supporting the lobster fishery like this

It’s a fairly well known secret in areas that produce lobsters (I lived in Nova Scotia for a long time).

Same with shrimp, and perhaps tomatoes.

It’s like flavor is constant regardless of volume, as size goes up, flavor density decreases.

For lobster at least, the sweetness of the meat decreases as a lobster gets bigger though it's more than just the same level of flavor compounds being spread across a smaller amount of total mass.

This is true of virtually all animals we eat. When I fished, the 1 lb bass was a keeper and the 4 lb bass was a throw-back.

I hear some farmers pump water into chickens to increase the weight so it sells for more. I also hear the same thing about bean moisture content since it's sold by weight (I think the Smarter Every Day has a video about granaries that shows this?).

Will this put pressure for farmed lobsters to be full of growth hormones?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2493311/

Not sure if it's practiced a lot, but it's possible.

If you happen to know, I've been curious about the water weight of various foods. In particular, I've bought dried or canned beans or tuna or other such things, and attempting to correct for the water weight I normalized on total labeled protein mass (or some other relevant macronutrient) rather than total mass. However, water content still varied dramatically for on-paper identical goods.

Do you happen to know if that's a quirk of US food labeling laws (e.g., they can report a certain number of grams of protein per gram of food so long as water is within a 40% margin), or if there's some other factor at play that would allow macronutrients to actually be similar in qualitatively different products?

Suggested title update: include species context, which is the American or Maine Lobster (officially "Homarus americanus").

That species is quite different from the myriad species of spiny lobster that are common throughout much of the world (notably that the American Lobster has claws).

I wonder whether lobsters will respond by evolving to be smaller adults.

https://phys.org/news/2022-11-overfished-lobster-bigger-area...

They grow bigger because they get to live longer?

I don’t think these policies last long enough to show up on an evolutionary timescale.

I know the practice of de-clawing crabs led to small claws as a dominant characteristic till it was abandoned, and similarly the illegality of harvesting molting variants of hard-shelled crabs resulted in local populations of permanently quasi-soft-shell crabs. Admittedly that took decades rather than the few years we might see for a lobster size ban, but minor evolutionary tweaks when those phenotypes already exist in the wild don't take long to establish themselves under heavy fishing pressure.

Why not maximum size? Larger lobsters produce significantly more eggs than small ones. A big one might be worth 2-5 times a small one and it’s a proven survivor

Better get it done before this most recent Supreme Court case gets overruled and biased courts will set the laws when they aren't subject matter experts.

The (US) courts rule on the legality of the laws with respect to the constitution and then rule if the prosecution/enforcement of the law is correct within the legal framework.

The law is set by the legislators.

If SCOTUS overturns the Chevron Doctrine it probably wouldn't matter much when this gets ruled on as it would likely be challenged after the fact.

>>biased courts Yeah I totally am with you there. Courts should be about laws not any sort of bias. “A Government of Laws and Not of Men” -John Adams

Ah yes because unelected bureaucrats are unbiased.

It feels so strange that lobster are cheap in the US. There is this place at the Alpine Rd. in Portala Valley with the name "Lobster shack" that sells fast food lobsters.

I mean, it was nice, but felt like a waste on the lobsters ...

For much of history lobsters were considered "sea bugs" and reserved for the poorest of the poor to eat, much as one might treat a cockroach. The idea that they are valuable is a rather recent invention.

Here's some further reading on this and other interesting lobster lore, by the MIT Sea Grant Program:

https://seagrant.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Lobster_...

Where are these cheap lobster?

That place was casual but not cheap; ~$30 for a lobster roll. It’s out of business now.

Oh. Seems like the owner got jail time for tax fraud. Could have explained the price point ...

(Cheap, as in cheap compared to lobsters in Europe).

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