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Comment by NegativeLatency | Hacker News Reader

It's really frustrating how hard it is to properly manage/use a resource like the ocean.

We're not running out of chicken, but we are running out of fish.

We are running out of the very small selection of species of fish that we want to buy. The wast majority of fish belong to those that we don't want to buy, which either get thrown away or sold for almost nothing in order to be smashed into animal feed.

To say that we are running out of fish (generally) is problematic since there is overpopulation problems in lakes near where I live. The problem is that the fish isn't the kind that people want to buy, so fishermen goes where the money is.

Actually in long term we are running out of all fish due to acidification of the oceans. But that will happen much further in the future.

Jellyfish should be fine

And sea turtles!

Fish discarded are dead also.

Because we are feeding the fish to the chickens. We provide the calories for the chicken to grow, but we harvest fish without such inputs. If we were harvesting wild chickens, or at least chickens that caught their own food in the wild, we would certainly wipe them out in a matter of days if not hours.

we're also feeding fish meal (from the ocean) to farmed salmon in aquaculture operations

i think it was Cousteau who said that farming carnivorous fish like salmon was just a terrible idea. it requires a really high ratio of fish meal protein to salmon protein, something like 6 to 1.

we'd be better off farming more fish that behave like Tilapia. they can eat their own excrement.

I think you have to work on that pitch a little. Eats its own shit?

Whatever, Tilapia is tasty and ecological.

Yes, I like Tilapia too. But the pitch may need tuning nevertheless. :)

Do you eat rabbit? Rabbits eat their own shit.

I've lived on farms with dogs, cats, pigs, goats, horses, chickens, etc. The only farm animals I haven't seen eat their own shit are cattle, but frankly it wouldn't shock me to make that discovery someday.

you've got to be shittin me. I suppose you assume the animals were in distress from captivity.

Certainly not. I've lived on farms most of my life, and I have no moral objections to farm animals, their lot in life, or their occasional coprophagy impulse. It really isn't that weird to eat shit. Has anyone alive really not seen a dog do it?

Did you really create a new account to make that comment? What's the motivation there?

Because they need to recyclate some specific kind of valuable vitamin created by bacteria from rabbit stomach, I think, so they need to pass two times by the gut the same material. In any case what rabbits ruminate does not apply to Tilapia, is a different kind of animal.

If Tilapia arent feeded, they will eat algae and smaller Tilapia. Small tilapia fry can survive eating microbes and algae that grow in organic residues for a while, but this is a different question. Giving cattle the minimum to just survive is not the same as farming cattle.

In Australia where Basa fillets can go as cheap as $5/kg in a supermarket (Chicken breasts are can be as cheap as $9/kg for reference), some people don't buy Basa fillets. Why? The reputation of basa is that it's farmed poorly in Vietnam where people shit in the same farm that grow fish.

Note: Basa is a type of catfish that can grow well despite dirty water.

I understand the logic of this phrase, but I don't see Cousteau eating a lot of herbivorous fish in his films. When they fish and cook fishes in the Calipso, are often from carnivorous species. Because carnivorous fish are delicious, and herbivorous fish often just so-so. There is not reason to put your money in a product that nobody will buy.

On the other hand, Tilapia needs proteins. Few animals can trive eating just its own discarding products, void for definition of anything that would merit to be recicled by the fish metabolism.

If their fish (or cattle, or poultry) is so hungry that start to eat their own excrement, they are just making a very poor product, and scamming their customers.

why not grow crickets for salmon feed?

i personally would not object to that. i guess farms are not set up to do that (yet).

i've heard that wild sockeye salmon eat a lot of insects and therefore wind up with lower levels of mercury than, say, tuna. farmed salmons is not sockeye.

Fish farms are a thing too (and an ecological problem)

Passenger pigeons were hunted to extinction as food for humans. Last one died in 1914. Hunting supposedly intensified sometime in the 1800's... so probably significantly less than 100 years to hunt a bird species to extinction.

Tragedy of the commons. If people owned areas of the ocean in the way they own areas of land for farming, this would be less of an issue.

Look how Victor Harbour in South Australia managed its fishing allocations for a great example of how to pull this kind of thing off. But it’s not easy.

It's not quite as easy with the ocean. Land doesn't tend to flow around freely.

And the ocean is _deep_, too, and it's much easier to pollute your neighbours.

But the basic principle is the same: private property rights can help mitigate these problems.

Tell that to the 1322+ Superfund sites in the US costing ~1 billion per year.

The optimum strategy for small land ownership is often maximum exploitation. In the case of the ocean fishing people would fish as much as possible, and just wait for more fish to wonder back.

Yeah that's because your bankruptcy laws are broken AFAICT - it's too easy to hold insufficient funds for post operational clean-up, then transfer assets elsewhere and declare bankruptcy.

That is, private owners in this case are able to socialise the cost of their operation, which is no more private ownership than when the profits are socialised.

There are plenty of examples of well-managed fisheries but it takes cooperation with/from the fisherman and enforcing the regulations so that fisheries remain sustainable.

Here's a list of North American fisheries, some of which are well managed: http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/sfa/statusoffisheries/2011/second/Q...

Unless the oceans had a low rate of return, then you would kill all the fish as quickly as possible and invest the proceeds in higher-returning assets.

Just convince the fish to stay in their registered area.

For others interested in solutions, look at the traditional Swedish farmer's methods of managing common resources. Actually a Nobel Prize was awarded based on work documenting and implementing these and similar practices in far-flung areas of the world in need of them (e.g. cod fishing in the Atlantic, common resources in Africa, etc).

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