• chetradley@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    We’re undoubtedly in the midst of another mass extinction, caused by human activity. Here’s another one that will freak you out:

      • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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        6 months ago

        Dude. This is loaded as fuck misinformation and you should be ashamed of yourself.

        Cod fishing on Canada’s eastern coastal area has been banned since 1992. That’s why it’s flattened out to nothing all of a sudden. They stopped Cod fishing there.

        • mozz@mbin.grits.devOP
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          6 months ago

          Cod fishing on Canada’s eastern coastal waters was halted in 1992 for two years, with the plan being that the population would recover and they could start fishing again. Did you think the population recovered and they just decided not to start fishing again because they forgot? Or that they just had woken up one day and decided to take the drastic step of banning fishing and throwing 30,000 people out of work and destroying one of their thriving industries because nothing had happened to the fish?

          The collapse happened before the ban, not after. And they took long enough to notice and implement it that the fishery was driven to total, semi-permanent collapse before the ban, to an extent that they didn’t fully realize until several years had gone by and the fish still hadn’t recovered.

          Here’s a pretty detailed summary of the before and after. In 2005, after 13 years of the ban, the cod biomass off Canada’s coast was still about 3% of its pre-industrial-fishing levels. That’s why there’s still a ban: Not that they just hate sending out boats and bringing in fish, but that the population’s still fucked and not really recovering, and so any fishing would be simply giving some additional cleaver-whacks to the already dead golden goose. I don’t know what the numbers are now, but I would be surprised if they are dramatically better, and I think the chart I cited is an extremely honest and vivid picture of the results of overfishing, and not loaded or anything else as-fuck.

      • Mavvik@lemmy.ca
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        6 months ago

        This is kind of misleading since they closed the fishery (I think in the 90s), so the amount of cod catch would naturally plummet. The fishery did, however, need to be closed due to overfishing.

        • mozz@mbin.grits.devOP
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          6 months ago

          Not exactly; it collapsed, then they closed it once it was too late, and now it’s still fucked, 30 years later.

          In the early-1990s, the industry collapsed entirely.

          In 1992, John Crosbie, the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, set the quota for cod at 187,969 tonnes, even though only 129,033 tonnes had been caught the previous year.

          In 1992 the government announced a moratorium on cod fishing.[12] The moratorium was at first meant to last two years, hoping that the northern cod population would recover and the fishery. However, catches were still low,[16] and thus the cod fishery remained closed.

          By 1993 six cod populations had collapsed, forcing a belated moratorium on fishing.[14] Spawning biomass had decreased by at least 75% in all stocks, by 90% in three of the six stocks, and by 99% in the case of “northern” cod, previously the largest cod fishery in the world.[14] The previous increases in catches were wrongly thought to be due to “the stock growing” but were caused by new technologies such as trawlers.[13]

          • Mavvik@lemmy.ca
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            6 months ago

            That’s a fair point. It still is a misleading plot since it isn’t an estimate cod population, and isn’t representative of population after 1992. As you said the numbers are still bleak. I found this plot , Source , which does tell a similar story around the early 90s but indicates greater recovery in more recent years.

      • otp@sh.itjust.works
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        6 months ago

        You can see where they decided “Profit, with no consideration of anything else!” was the answer

        • oo1@lemmings.world
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          6 months ago

          I’m going to guess it wasn’t a decision, so much as tech availability and pricing. radar, sonar, more powerful boats with bigger trawl nets.

          If they’d had that stuff earlier it’d be the same tragedy of the same commons.

          • otp@sh.itjust.works
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            6 months ago

            Fair.

            If we could’ve fucked things over a decade ago, we definitely would’ve!

          • MalReynolds@slrpnk.net
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            6 months ago

            Somewhere there was an asshole who made a decision, one of our failures as a (global, makes it harder) society is failing to hold responsibility accountable. Do the crime, do the time.

    • brisk@aussie.zone
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      6 months ago

      There’s something wrong with this data.

      The fraction of asses should be way higher.

    • Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works
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      6 months ago

      This makes no sense… It says pets aren’t included.

      There are 500-700 million dogs worldwide. There are only just under 59 million horses.

      I don’t believe any of this as a result.

      Edit: and 35 million camels …and only a billion cattle. This entire thing is demonstrably bullshit.

      • mozz@mbin.grits.devOP
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        6 months ago

        700 million dogs x 17 kg per dog = 12 Mt of dog

        59 million horses x 700 kg per horse = 41 Mt of horse

        If horses are 2%, then dogs are 0.5%, less than 1% just like they said

        35 million camels x 500 kg per camel = 17 Mt of camel, a little less than 1%

        I think the key thing is they’re measuring biomass, not just the number of animals, otherwise it would all be stuff like mice and rats (not to say that wouldn’t be a valid thing to look at also)

      • stebo02@sopuli.xyz
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        6 months ago

        BioMASS is not about the number of animals but about their mass. Sure there’s a lot of dogs and cats but they don’t weigh as much as a camel.

    • HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Why is that supposed to freak me out? We cultivate animals for consumption and there’s not a 1:1 absorption/usage ratio. Now add insect biomass.

      • meowMix2525@lemm.ee
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        6 months ago

        It doesn’t help that we chose the meatiest animals to keep as livestock and then made sure they got even fatter than they started by any means necessary. One factory farmed cow probably weighs like 12 wild deer and a few wild rabbits for good measure.

          • Viper_NZ@lemmy.nz
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            6 months ago

            How isn’t it relevant? Large animals like whales make up a disproportionate amount of ‘wild animal’ biomass. But rats, mice etc will make up a sizeable proportion too while being human centric pests in much of the world.

            4% is actually worse than it looks.