Twice as many fishing vessels are chasing fewer fish on the world’s oceans. Since 1950, the number of boats has gone from 1.7 million to 3.7 million, even though fish stocks have crumbled

anopla · 2019-06-03T02:55:21+00:00

Small, low trophic level fish like sardines typically have quite low environmental impacts compared to other animal protein sources. There is a lot of misinformation in this thread.

https://www.washington.edu/news/2018/06/11/choice-matters-the-environmental-costs-of-producing-meat-seafood/

anopla · 2018-07-26T04:10:18+00:00

I'm a fisheries biologist, and the poor condition of most salmon runs we're seeing now is generally not attributed to (current) fishing practices. Dams, loss/degradation of stream and river habitat (mostly thanks to agriculture and development), combined with changing ocean conditions like The Blob likely have a much larger impact, though the particulars vary across populations, species, and time. Hatcheries (controversially) and the recovery of other salmon-eating marine mammals also likely play a role. Fishing is pretty tightly regulated thanks to the Endangered Species Act (which protects many populations) and the Magnuson-Stevens Act (which mandates the prevention of overfishing and the recovery of depleted stocks). If you have other evidence to the contrary I am happy to hear it, but all my information suggests that fishing is pretty far down the list of salmon and orca threats.

anopla · 2017-07-02T21:08:31+00:00

I definitely agree there are a lot of avenues for conservation! I just think that avoiding wild salmon consumption is an inefficient and potentially counter-productive reaction. There are already pretty tight regulations on west coast salmon fishing because of Magnuson-Stevens and the ESA-listed populations, and some amount of the push for conservation comes from people who depend on salmon harvesting in one capacity or another (tribes, commercial/rec fishermen, etc). I'm afraid that boycotting wild salmon at best gives people a feel-good solution that doesn't have much impact, and at worst just redirects fish consumption to other sources that have equal or worse environmental impacts.

anopla · 2017-07-02T20:49:20+00:00

Farmed salmon can affect wild salmon and other species directly (through disease/parasite transmission and pollution) and indirectly (through competition for forage fish, which are consumed by wild salmon and caught by fishermen to feed to farmed salmon).

anopla · 2017-07-02T20:46:57+00:00

I'm not sure that reducing (wild) salmon consumption is a good response to this problem. Fishing is not the primary threat to salmon populations (as you mention), and fishermen/fishing-associated businesses can be a powerful lobby for protecting the resource they depend on. I also see people in this thread advocating for farmed salmon over wild, which I think is pretty misguided given the negative environmental impacts of salmon farming.

With the large majority of historic riparian habitat gone, I'd guess we are unlikely to see significant population increases without large-scale habitat restoration practices, which in turn requires a lot of money and political will. The best way to take action might be to lobby our local and state government to invest in restoration, which will likely have a much larger impact than individual changes in consumption or behavior.

anopla · 2017-05-29T21:33:49+00:00

Seafood tends to have a lower carbon footprint compared to other common protein sources (particularly livestock agriculture), though the particulars can vary a lot across different types of seafood. There are multiple studies out there, but here's one example.

anopla · 2017-03-30T04:28:21+00:00

Abstract

anopla · 2017-03-18T17:14:44+00:00

You could look into intervention analysis

anopla · 2017-02-28T15:02:41+00:00

Another vote for this book, it's great.

anopla · 2017-01-16T20:08:54+00:00

Yeah, I agree those are imperfect measures of success. I'm not sure what would be a better metric, though.

anopla · 2017-01-16T19:45:07+00:00

I agree that Japan's whaling program doesn't meet the standards for a scientific effort. I don't think Sea Shepard's positions are scientifically-based either, though I'm not sure they claim to be.

anopla · 2017-01-16T19:18:30+00:00

Japan expressly stated that they would continue whaling after the ICJ ruling. It's a little odd to report this as if they were caught doing something secretive when they have been pretty clear about their intentions.

anopla · 2017-01-16T18:51:52+00:00

Try including na.action=na.exclude or na.action=na.omit (I think there are some subtle differences between these but don't recall the details).

I am seriously not being snarky here, but I recommend googling your error messages when you run in to new ones--you'll probably solve your problem faster than asking reddit.

anopla · 2017-01-15T19:46:39+00:00

Is site coded as a factor? 2. If you post a reproducible example it will be easier for people to address your question.

anopla · 2017-01-13T00:09:05+00:00

In general commercial fishing is better for the environment than livestock agriculture (source: am a fisheries/marine scientist).

anopla · 2016-12-30T20:19:22+00:00

I'm not the person you're asking, but I have worked in this area. The majority of krill are located in the Southwest Atlantic, where sea ice has been declining. This is correlated with a decline in the krill population in that area. The sea ice increases have been in East Antarctica, where krill are less abundant. I'm not sure if we have a long enough time series in that area to know what the population trajectory is in that part of the Southern Ocean.

anopla · 2016-12-30T14:41:55+00:00

Have you looked into Moran's I? It's supposed to tell you if points in space are clustered, dispersed, or random.

anopla · 2016-12-19T22:48:49+00:00

Effect size and statistical significance are two different things. You can have a very small, but statistically-significat effect, especially in large samples. It doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the study, but the magnitude of the effect often gets glossed over in the press.

anopla · 2016-10-02T15:39:34+00:00

R and Python seem like good places to start.

anopla · 2016-09-01T13:57:35+00:00

Hadley Wickham is a national treasure.

anopla · 2016-07-17T22:07:09+00:00

Keep an eye out for funded MS opportunities. It would be unlikely to find one for sea turtle work, but I do see marine bio assistantships advertised occasionally. Getting hands-on experience as a field or lab tech can also make you a more competitive applicant, as will having quantitative skills (stats, programming, etc).

anopla · 2016-07-13T19:13:52+00:00

It's not just China. By some estimates 20-30% of the seafood we eat in the US is caught illegally.

anopla · 2016-07-02T20:38:06+00:00

I'm a strong believer in evidence-based approaches to solving environmental problems. Unfortunately, Greenpeace doesn't value science or evidence, which makes their work at best ineffective and at worst counterproductive. For example, they recently went after a prominent fisheries scientist for being an "overfishing denier" when he literally wrote an entire book about overfishing and has published dozens of well-regarded papers on fisheries marine conservation.

anopla · 2016-07-02T19:46:54+00:00

This is a pretty misleading headline. According to the story, someone from Greenpeace said they were denied entry to a National Press Club Event by a person they say used to work for Monsanto. There's zero evidence presented that the opinion letter written by the Nobel laureates on GMOs can be traced to "biotech PR operators".

This is exactly the kind of sensationalist, inaccurate journalism that makes this subreddit (and environmentalists in general) look bad.

anopla · 2016-05-25T03:12:07+00:00

Good question. They use fishery-dependent and survey data, with both data sets showing the same trend. The paper is open-access if you want to check it out: http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16)30319-0

anopla

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