Biologists discover four new octopus species
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/biodiversi...
Your assumption regarding splitting known species is wrong as it comes to numbers. It often happens for birds but this doesn't move the needle as there's only 10K birds.
Almost every species on this planet is an arthropod and most are not described. It's trivially easy to "discover" new ones. Go to a bio-diverse area (say a jungle) and fill a wheelbarrow with soil. Filter the dirt and describe anything you find. It will take you forever but there will be dozens if not hundreds of "new" species. The main bottleneck is not finding them, it's describing them, which is very time consuming.
Put some specialized lights up in the same area at night. One remote site I attended in Colombia discovered on average 20 new species of moth every single day. There's expected to be 150K moth species, which still may be an underestimation.
And this doesn't even describe the truly tiny organisms living in soil and rivers and oceans.
As it comes to species, the public has a bias for mammals and birds. Combined they're about 17-18K species only. Not even a drop in the ocean. You can split each of them into 10 separate species and this still doesn't do anything to inflate the total amount of species.
Next is a whole lot of work to actually describe it which a tourist would typically not be doing, so the idea that you should get naming credit is not a given. There's no hard rule for it.
You can definitely give input for the name, and there's rules to naming. You can't name it after a company, for example.
The most generous example I've seen is a research organization where you can "buy" a species name. Within taxonomy rules, you can decide on a name for a fee, even if you didn't discover the species at all. It's a way to fund research.
In my experience though, getting an actual discovery described is the real issue. I've discovered both plants and insects new to science myself, did the work of collecting specimens and sending them to the correct authorities, but years later there's zero movement. Taxonomists are severely underfunded.
Ah, so wait, is there a central taxonomy office (or at least relatively centralized ones for different species groups) that is basically backlogged like a government passport office? Is that how it works?
In a way, anybody can attempt to "add" a new species by describing it in a paper. So you'd typically send your specimen to the most fitting specialist willing and able to write that paper. The paper would then hopefully be reviewed by a naming authority.
But a naming authority is just a bunch of people that got this authority by reputation. It's not the government. There may be regional authorities as well as multiple naming authorities for the same groups of species, not agreeing on species' status.
All of this mess is then stitched together into a best-effort central database. Not even the categorization (so taxonomy levels) is singular, there's multiple systems. Species are constantly moved, split, merged.
"Researchers have come up with wide-ranging estimates for how many species there are. As May points out, this ranges anywhere from 3 to well over 100 million – many orders of magnitude of difference. Some more recent studies estimate that this figure is as much as one trillion."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unseen_species_problem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good%E2%80%93Turing_frequency_...
For intuition of how this is possible, imagine you sample k butterflies independently and all of them come from different species. By the birthday paradox, if there were less than k^2/2 different species, you would expect to see at least one pair from the same species, so you can estimate that there are more than k^2/2 different species.
Most fish are caught and some sea based farming efforts have been pretty terrible for the environment.
I reckon if you want to eat meat still you should mostly be eating chicken.
But favorably chicken that has seen the sun and real soil to pick in, not only on the way to the slaughterhouse.
And there is nothing inheritently wrong with fishing, it is just that the way it is usually done, is quite horrific. But there is somewhat certified ethical fishing. Or local fishermen.
Also like the sibling comment said, not really possible with our tech and knowledge. Lab grown meat would be the way to go to achieve it.
I imagine the meat would be pretty tasteless though.
What’s the plan once the oceans are messed up permanently?
At this moment, I think factory farmed chicken would have less impact on the environment.
When you are not overfishing and destroying the ground with bad trawling, where is the problem?
(But yes, it is a problem, that both is done)
The oceans warming is a separate problem.
And I like fish as well as chicken as well as beef. But I don't have to eat it every day.
Overfishing aside, I guess you would most often find people that believe hunting /fishing for your food is more ethical than farming it
Nowadays, there are many more humans and domestic animals than wild terrestrial vertebrates, so hunting could not sustain any non-negligible fraction of the humans.
The modern methods of fishing are much too wasteful, so neither fishing has any future.
I used to be pescatarian and my main reason for that was factory farming. Once reason I now eat meat is that it has become a lot easier to buy meat that has been well treated.
By virtually all metrics, intensive land-based animal farming is much harder on the environment. Also, in terms of animal welfare, its super sketchy even with animals labeled organic.
The misinformation around fish farming is absurd. I think people want to believe in the myth that commercial fishing is a couple guys in a wooden boat; when its actually a floating factory discarding up to half or more of what it kills.
There are many aquatic things I won't eat but mostly it is of the "wild fish" variety (overfishing, pollution, mercury, bycatch). I worked a single season as a fisheries observer in Alaska. The destruction was maddening.
I put wild fish in quotes because many times they are raised in a hatcheries then released into the wild. Which has ruined the gene pool of salmon in places that do this.
After a few years raising chickens at my home farm, I became pescatarian. I drew an arbitrary line at intelligence where I wouldn't eat anything as smart or smarter than a chicken.
Anyhow, avoiding farmed fish while eating land meat is really misinformed. I think the meat industry and commercial fishing industries have managed to completely misinform the American public (and a few well-meaning but misleading documentaries on the subject).
America doesn't not farm very many aquatic things besides oysters, trout and catfish. Which are all very very green industries. I like to bring these ones up in conversations about this topic.
I’m not saying we should eat “land meat”. I’m saying specifically chicken. I believe they are the most cost effective of the meats.
Of the farmed fish, did you single out trout and catfish because they are green, or has the industry in general improved?
I regularly eat pig despite a higher level of sentience. And despite having had far more interactions with pigs compared to Octopus.
Point being, we humans really are not rational with our food choices.
Please don't make false accusations about a third part without a minimum understanding of the matter first.
Nueva Pescanova has nothing to do with this case, and I doubt that they would be interested at all in breeding a deep sea (and, most probably, non edible) species.
Also if you put this animals at the surface they will literally burst from inside and turn into a mushy mess. I had explained this yet a few times before, but for some reason this particular Muusoctopus nursery is a recurrent history on HN.
Octopuses are benthic, so they could store a different amount of ammonia, but my bet would be that such partially disintegrated octopus product would look and taste awful. None of the other species of deep sea octopuses are fished commercially.
The traditional method begins with gutting and beheading a shark and placing it in a shallow hole dug in gravelly sand, with the cleaned cavity resting on a small mound of sand. The shark is then covered with sand and gravel, and stones are placed on top of the sand in order to press the fluids out of the body. The shark ferments in this fashion for six to twelve weeks, depending on the season. Following this curing period, the shark is cut into strips and hung to dry for several months. During this drying period, a brown crust will develop, which is removed prior to cutting the shark into small pieces and serving.
> Those new to it [Hákarl] may gag involuntarily at the first attempt to eat it because of the high ammonia content.
Hongeo-hoe is a type of fermented fish dish from Korea's Jeolla province. Hongeo-hoe is made from skate and emits a very strong, characteristic ammonia-like odor
Skates (hongeo) are cartilaginous fish that excrete uric acid through the skin, rather than by urinating as other animals do. As they ferment, ammonia is produced, which helps preserve the flesh and gives the fish its distinctive, powerful odor.
But I'm perfectly fine with the idea of some people loving the pee taste, or eating rotten shark meat, or urinating in other people's mouths while eating carp croquettes. As long as those people is not me, good for them. I'll pass. Thank you.
Feel free to eat this new discovered octopus before any other human and tell us about your experience. My bet is that will be memorable for all the wrong reasons
In any case, skate meat should be forbidden by conservation issues. Their populations are very fragile and on a sharp decline, and to eat this animals is very irresponsible.
It's also about £8.50 for 500g.
ffs. We are, collectively, utter morons aren't we?
I usually accept any given internet comment as unimpeachable truth, and was just about to fire off a bunch of angry hate mail to Nueva Pescanova because of this specific thing!
Gosh, would I have felt silly to find out that they're not literally building cages for this particular species!
Do you have a source for your claim that nobody in this company is currently planning to build cages 10,000' underwater for a species that was just discovered?
Explore Earth before exploring outside Earth
There's also just a kind of social narrative issue, where space is cool because sci-fi and aliens and astrophysics, while the deep oceans are scary because dark and unknown and shipwrecks. I guess it's like "if we explore space, we might find alien life; if we explore the oceans, we might find a really weird fish".
Space is equated to future(potential expedition target for humanity leaving earth) while oceans remind us of the past i.e. submerged & lost cities, ships etc. and honestly very few people are excited to explore the past.
Space is also out there and oceans are here. You can point to the sky and say that's what we are aiming and people will relate compared to "we are planning to explore xyz trench 500 miles north of abc island".
Of course, the rocket billionaires don't generally ride on the rockets themselves. So that's safer for them personally.
There are benefits of exploring the oceans too, like maybe finding some missing link species and learning about biology maybe some geology. But they seem much lesser to me.
Less so for submarines exploring the depths of the ocean, even if the latter is equally or more interesting from a scientific exploration perspective.
We have an AI for this exact task now, Seek by iNaturalist. It keeps getting rave reviews.
The only problem is that it's terrible at identifying things. I have a picture of an elephant seal that it is certain actually shows a clouded monitor lizard.
This is one of the stupidest comments I've ever seen. The app is provided by iNaturalist, and its name is, literally, "Seek by iNaturalist".
Check it out: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/seek_app
I really don't get the dismay. Sheep, cows, fish even, feel pain and probably feel emotions. So why stop now? It's such an arbitrary line.
However, the current consensus is that consciousness/sentience is a gradient. The higher the sentience, the higher the ability to experience (anything, including pain and emotions).
We believe humans to be more sentient than octopi, which are more sentient than cows, which are more sentient than fish, which are more sentient than yeast.
We might be wrong of course. It's probably impossible to even ever find out. But no one cares about hurting yeast.
They have centuries and centuries to settle the question while rearing and killing billions of human beings each year.
N.B. The price of baby meat is higher because it's more tender or whatever.
Now ask yourself if the level of sentience that develops in this environment is satisfactory. Is there even a chance of developing thinking matter that can have a debate about ethics?
Fortunately we could teach this aliens about the delicacy of octopus farming.
Then, it's easy to grow a conscience when confronted to trendy newish things like so-called sentient animals we never really ate before.
This is a good thing. Growing the masse's consciousness through new fads and phenomenons is a great way to create cognitive dissonance that contribute to changing old habits. Even if one will always encounter resistance to change.
Speaking personally, I wish we'd stopped sooner. I'm not here to say all meat is bad and everyone should be vegan, but I don't feel it's out of bounds to be dismayed that we're expanding the barbarity to new animals that clearly appear to have a form of higher intelligence.
I'm not the arbiter of truth on this, but I'm sad when I see pigs in factory farms, and I'm every bit as dismayed to see us expanding this to cephalopods just the same as if we expanded this to domestic canines.
They can do basically anything that a bird does, but underwater, and also a lot of tricks that we can't do.
There is not a single bird or mammal crystal transparent, or electrical, or bioluminiscent, or that could change their color at will in seconds. If I remember correctly, the vertebrates with the biggest brain/body weight ratio, or the fastest movement registered, are fishes.