Comment by richardjordan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by richardjordan | Hacker News Reader

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The shocking depletion of the world's fisheries over the last century and a half is one of the great tragedies of our modern civilization. We're causing mass extinction on a level we have to go back to the fossil record to see. We're eating fish that was previously thrown back or used as bait, often just giving it bogus pretty names (like Chilean Sea Bass).

I live in the US for now but having grown up in Europe I understand the situation there better. Nationalistic arguments resting on protecting 'traditional' livelihoods and preserving centuries old fishing villages have been used to continue subsidizing an industry with much larger collective fishing fleet than is possibly justifiable. Of course nowhere in this "tradition" argument is it ever acknowledged that traditionally we used vastly less sophisticated machinery and mechanisms so catches per fisherman were obviously dramatically lower - and we were STILL depleting stocks.

This is no different to any of our resource extraction industries sadly. Give rights to extract resource. Rights holders make tons of money. Use money to pervert political process and buy protection against breaches of law and regulation. Deplete resource. Move on.

The biggest challenge with fishing is the ocean is largely a shared resource. The incentive to preserve and protect is much smaller, because you can just fish in international waters or sneak over to somebody else's waters to fish, and conserving in your own waters may be fruitless because other people will come a'fishin!

Basically, one giant global tragedy of the commons.

Ironically, recreational hunters solved this problem a long time ago. Give people a private plot and a quota and they will make sure populations stay healthy in that plot and surrounding areas. There are more whitetail deer in North America now after these kinds of hunting practices than there were when the first European settlers arrived.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-tailed_deer#Human_interac...

While in general you're right, deer aren't a great example. Deer populations in much of the US are actually higher than they historically would have been, largely because predator populations have been artificially and dramatically constrained. Most deer predators, but especially gray wolves, are also livestock predators, which has justified their population control.

That's basically my point, though. The problem with the ocean is that this sort of solution has not been implemented and may in fact be very difficult to implement. The ocean is difficult to fence off, and the actors are basically states who have no superior authority that can truly enforce such things.

Precisely. No property rights, no desire to preserve property.

I attribute the tragedy to the fact we farm the soil for ages, grow cattle for as much as long, but fishing was always considered cheap, given the sheer size of the ocean (we're far past the regeneration point), when in fact, fish has the biggest potential of all for intensive farming.

Fish farming already is a booming industry in some countries, and the tendency is to double in the next decade. There's a lot to improve yet, specially on small scale and associated with hydroponics, only now we are seeing research into that. If you want to invest, this a good area to put your money.

It's worth noting that, in the United States a at least, there is a strong anti-farmed fish movement coming from the environmentalist community. They like to point out all of the damage that fish farming does to a local ecology without acknowledging the much greater damage that catching wild fish does. As a result, there is a lot of hesitation among some consumers to purchase farmed fish.

The objection is basically this: the desirable fish to farm are mostly meat-eaters. To feed these fish, large quantities of random fish are driftnetted and fed to the fish farms. That is, fish farms are converting 10 or 100 pounds of bait fish into one pound of marketable fish. This method of farming fish WORSENS the ocean depletion problem, it doesn't improve it. It would actually be better to simply fish for tuna directly.

There are objections to farmed salmon. Not even the most hard core environmentalist cares about farmed tilapia or catfish.

If you want an environmentally friendly wild fish, I'd recommend Mahi Mahi. They are the rats of the ocean. There are times when you can't get away from them.

These farmers are exploiting the higher margins of rare species, not scale, otherwise they would be looking after the highly productive species. Regulation would be enough to change the industry.

It's no different than cattle. We're used to red meat but it's actually a wasteful industry that has a huge impact on ecology. We only keep raising cattle because it sells for a premium (red meat is the most expensive source of protein).

The impact of fish farmers that grow carnivore fish is comparable to the impact of destroying native land to farm soy/corn used to feed cattle. We just got used to it. There are other ways though.

I've been in sea fish farms and I'm a spearfisher hobbyst myself.

Beyond the notion that fish farms are a sustainable source of fish meat, the fact is that fish farming needs a fodder supply to feed the fish. Fish eat fish, remember? This means in its majority the fodder produced nowadays comes from wild fish, probably a cheaper one to catch than de one in the farming nets. So wild fish still needs to be catched.

But it's even worse than that. Much worse... In order to grow fish in the farming nets the fish needs to eat much more than its weight in order to grow a little,just like any other animal. This means that it is much more ecological for us to eat the fish that is processed to make fish flour (fodder) than eat the fish that comes from fish farms.

What a nonsense isn't it? But still, we want tuna...

> Beyond the notion that fish farms are a sustainable source of fish meat, the fact is that fish farming needs a fodder supply to feed the fish.

This is not the only model. There are fish, specially freshwater, you can feed on algae and micro crustaceans, which in turn consume organic waste from traditional farming. That's where research is going into, and where fish farming is more promising, not the sea net model.

Tilapia is produced in large scale this way quite successfully, and is a desirable meat that sells for a good price here in Brazil.

Why is farming superior to properly managed wild fisheries? Over fishing is the problem. I don't see farming as the obvious solution. Farmed fish are loaded with toxins, as I understand it. The pollution is also a problem.

Even farming cattle in the way we do it is not really sustainable. There is a strong case to be made that hunted venison should be a staple meat at grocery stores. There is also a strong argument that a lot of farmland should be reverted to bison range and hunted for sale.

> Why is farming superior to properly managed wild fisheries? Over fishing is the problem.

... and over fishing occurs because management of wild stock is clearly not working.

Plus, there's a lot of waste in the chain that is diminished on fish farming.

> Farmed fish are loaded with toxins, as I understand it. The pollution is also a problem.

The toxins in farmed fish, mainly in salmon, are just a reflex of the toxins everywhere in the habitat (pesticides, untreated sewage), bad methods (fish fed with chicken waste) and lack of regulation. It's a non-issue where they don't crap on their own food and do it right (Chilean salmon, for instance).

> Even farming cattle in the way we do it is not really sustainable.

I agree. But the sad truth is that beef and bacon sells, and the planet would be devoid of mammals by tomorrow morning if we switched overnight to hunting game. Human population only got to the current size exactly because we raise cattle (among other things).

On top of that, there are ways to farm native species inside their own habitat, which helps bringing the population levels back to normal, like in your Buffalo example.

> management of wild stock is clearly not working

So fix it. If the USN blew a few ships in treaty violation out of the water things would change quickly.

You can find projections on the web so I'm not going to link here, but even if fishing got 100% regulated we would be past the capacity for the next years (other things factored in, as coastal pollution, desertification of corals and global warming).

A great example is slimehead (Hoplostethus atlanticus), known in the US market by the more familiar name orange roughy. H. atalanticus is very long lived (up to ~150 years) and has a low reproductive rate. Forty years ago orange roughy was not commercially harvested. Today, the species has been so effectively harvested by bottom trawling that in most fisheries, the species has crashed.

Man is it delicious. I was sad to learn it's a bad choice.

This is the primary reason that I think that restricting commercially farming Tilapia on-land, in large scale closed systems, in states like California is ridiculous.

I have been looking at all the amazing open space on the Island of Alameda - where the old Navy base was; I think that a company using the warehouse/open space to create an industrial sized version of Gardenpool.org's closed loop Tilapia setup would be an amazing opportunity.

Just curious, would it help to boycott eating certain fish on the endangered specifies list?

The Monterey Bay Aquarium has seafood watch. This includes iOS and Android apps to check while on the go.

http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/seafoodwatch.aspx

You can also download and print:

http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/cr_seafoodwatch/downlo...

"The Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch program creates science-based recommendations that help consumers and businesses make ocean-friendly seafood choices."

This is great! Exactly what I am looking for.

Not individually, but there are groups who attempt to keep track of which cause the most damage when you eat it. It's not likely to solve the problem in the long run though, because there are a lot of people who just don't care. Personally, I think the world should look to the Iceland model and institute strict quotas across the board.

If you can get another people to do so that fishing them becomes uneconomical.

The renaming trick is also done for meat. The horse/beef meat scandal in Europe shed a little bit of light on what we now call 'meat' which is remains that would have been thrown away before.

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