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Comment by Maursault | Hacker News Reader

I'm just curious what percentage of HN members diets is snow crab, and my point is snow crab isn't corn, wheat or chicken, and the only people this is going to affect are the snow crab fisherman, their families, and the economy of the towns in which they live and spend.

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This is a super shortsighted view. Every life form in the ocean plays a role in the ecosystem and catastrophic damages like this have first and second order effects all over the place.

I'm pretty sure my point was the only reason for harvesting snow crab is that it is lucrative for these fisherman, yet snow crab isn't an important staple of any diet, so there was absolutely no compelling societal reason to fish them into population collapse or extinction, not even greed. My suspicion is the majority of the product here was wasted, rotted and discarded, so we should really put pressure on commercial fishers in the US and abroad to find another way to support themselves in order to stop them from killing everything in the ocean rather than romanticize a way of life that is economically and ecologically unsustainable, such as is inexplicably done for ranchers, nor should we frame them as sympathetic victims of climate change.

i think the takeaway of the story isn't specifically that this season's snow crab season is cancelled, but that a population has collapsed because of some combination of climate change or overfishing. even if you don't eat crab it's bad news when 1 billion crabs go missing.

> it's bad news when 1 billion crabs go missing.

It's shocking, and yet not all that surprising.

It's relevant to all of us because it's yet another data point regarding how we live on this planet and what it's doing to ecosystems.

10% of mine

That seems like a lot. More than once a day? Or the only thing you eat every 10th day?

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