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Humanity making progress like it always does (mbin.grits.dev)

submitted 5 months ago by mozz@mbin.grits.dev to c/science_memes@mander.xyz

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[-] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 109 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Here's a fun one about the fish:

[-] ResoluteCatnap@lemmy.ml 61 points 5 months ago

That is not fun. That is the opposite of fun 🤕

[-] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 18 points 5 months ago

😢

[-] otp@sh.itjust.works 21 points 5 months ago

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

[-] oo1@lemmings.world 9 points 5 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 6 points 5 months ago

Fair.

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

[-] MalReynolds@slrpnk.net 1 points 5 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.

[-] Mavvik@lemmy.ca 16 points 5 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.dev 53 points 5 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 11 points 5 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.

[-] humbletightband@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 5 months ago

Fuck. Fish near China, India and Indonesia are doomed

[-] ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 5 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.dev 55 points 5 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.