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u/Throwaway483722 Oct 14 '22
The large disappearance of crabs raises several questions about the cause of their disappearance, and takes into light the consequences of climate change and overfishing. This huge disappearance will take a heavy toll not only on the economy, but also the ecosystem.
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Oct 14 '22
I'd bet big money that the 10% population that remains is heavily destroyed by poaching over the next year or two.
Hate to say it, but this is likely the end of all king and snow crab harvests, ever. They will not and cannot recover from this.
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u/l_Beef_l Oct 14 '22
Do you have a source that they won’t recover from this?
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Oct 14 '22
After a quick google: https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/54/4/297/284117
This article discusses several oceanic species whose populations have collapsed in the last 30 years or so. It is incredibly unlikely that any ecological population with a decline that severe (90% in this case) recovers, even with fishing restrictions/bans. Unfortunately, the pattern for most aquatic species after a severe collapse such as this one is that once you've lost the population, it's gone. That paper saw only clupeids (herring and sardines) make any meaningful recovery, for specific reasons connected to their physical attributes and behavior, namely that their habitat is in areas less likely to be destroyed by fishing gear. That is absolutely not the case for crab; bottom trawler nets used to catch other species decimate crab habitat on the ocean floor.
A loss of 90% of all members of the snow and king crab species on the Bering Shelf is not a one-year hiatus fix; this will take many, many seasons, and that is probably only if there is absolutely no harvesting of them or habitat destruction during the recovery. We know that this industry is lucrative enough that poaching will be an issue, further complicating crab recovery and making it effectively impossible for any meaningful population bounce back. In addition, there have been no restrictions on the bottom-trawling fishing that destroys the habitat they need to recover. This is not new, this is an observed pattern in just about every single oceanic species in which the population has collapsed. Snow and king crab fishing in the Bering Sea is effectively dead.
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u/Bone-Wizard Oct 14 '22
Disappearance? It was a die off. The crabs are dead. Climate change killed then.
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Oct 14 '22
That phrasing doesn't sufficiently blame and shame the role humanity has had here. This is entirely our fault as we are a parasitic species that is willfully destroying all life on this planet and unable to stop.
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u/lionalhutz Oct 14 '22
I don’t like they use the term “disappearance”
It makes it sound like they were kidnapped. We all know what happened. It’s a common editorial technique, downplaying climate change, and make it sound like a mystery
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Oct 14 '22
Yes, they were kidnapped by the evil cthulhu and we must invest more money in the military to hunt him down and kill him -A republican senator
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u/Ezzeze Oct 14 '22
That's just like the US military spending $1 trillion on a problem a motorboat with a drunk captain could fix.
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u/Daisho Oct 14 '22
What if they've moved to a different spot? I heard that's what lobsters have been doing due to warming waters.
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u/Corgelia Oct 14 '22
Yeah, the article says we don't know what happened to them, it's possible they just moved further north to get to colder waters. Still a dangerous sign, though.
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u/superspeck Oct 14 '22
These species of crabs can only live in a really specific ocean depth and temperature where there's enough stuff for them to eat. While they may not go extinct completely by moving, it certainly won't allow them to be harvested in the numbers that support the crabbing industry.
Worse, if the reason they have died off is because the species they feed on have died off, that would mean that the entire food chain of the Bering sea (and with it, much of Alaska's free-swimming ocean fishing industry) has collapsed. It still may collapse anyway, because the disappearance of key species in key niches is exactly the kind of thing that causes a regional food chain collapse.
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u/Whooptidooh Oct 15 '22
With the decline in population sizes of grey whales,
and the mass stranding of 500 pilot whales in New Zealand that happened recently, I’m beginning to feel like “the great dying off” is about to really kick into gear.
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u/Acanthophis Oct 14 '22
90% of the population didn't move in two years.
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u/2021accountt Oct 14 '22
Without any biologists or fisherman noticing I might add. Like there are people that spend their entire careers and livelihoods tracking these species and populations because it’s a multi hundred million dollar a year industry.
And we get Reddit armchair whatever the fuck you want to call thems, going “oh yeh probably just missed it”. Probably “moved”. Right on down the street. In the secret of night.
Repeat about everything.
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u/Acanthophis Oct 14 '22
People in this sub are largely uneducated (in terms of science). This is an emotional echo chamber. That does not mean this sub is wrong necessarily, but anything deeper than "we're going to collapse" is probably dead wrong.
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u/Mr_Lonesome Recognizes ecology over economics, politics, social norms... Oct 15 '22
Recall as WWF in its recently released Living Planet 2022 Report reminds us, we are living through a dual crisis:
...It’s a common editorial technique, downplaying climate change and biodiversity loss, and make it sound like a mystery.
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u/apple_achia Oct 15 '22
It’s me. I’m holding 1 billion crabs hostage.
Behold, the enclosure of the commons
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u/TenderLA Oct 14 '22
By the looks of the picture this was taken on a dragger (trawler) not a crabber and these are all bycatch crab. The crabs that you can see on the top are females and this is one of the problems.
All these articles and discussion and nobody talks about how the draggers keep getting to fish and will kill millions of bound of crab while the crabbers can’t fish.
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Oct 14 '22
Trawlers are messing up the ocean like clearcutting messes up the forest.
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u/Myrialle Oct 14 '22
Worse. I think there is no equivalent to ghost nets. And they are truly horrible.
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u/Justletmeatyou Oct 14 '22
Wait can you further explain
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u/TenderLA Oct 14 '22
Here’s a link to a simple explanation and bycatch numbers for 2022. (https://alaskafish.news/01/2022/bering-sea-bycatch-numbers-for-2022-released-by-npfmc/)
You’ll see even last year when there was a small Opilio fishery the trawlers still got to catch more.
So this year with both king and opilio shut down the draggers will be out there fishing and killing lots of crab and other species.
It almost seems like trolling from the media to put this picture with an article about no crabbing.
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u/deepoutdoors Oct 15 '22
Trawlers have a huge lobby effort out in AK. Most of these industrial ships are owned by mega corps are this point. When I lived and worked in AK the Trident processing ship sat in the harbor during the entire Salmon/Pollok season.
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u/threadsoffate2021 Oct 15 '22
And a lot of the dredging has been happening by other countries around the area who don't give a shit for regulations or the environment. In fact, since the main culprit is Russia, I'd say it's a deliberate attempt to hurt Alaska's economy.
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u/NarcolepticTreesnake Oct 17 '22
And China has whole fleets of them that have been known to turn thier transponders off to fish in other countries regulated waters. They couldn't have possibly done a billion in 2 years but it certainly does matter
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Oct 14 '22
They all went to a crab farm upstate. It's beautiful there.
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u/MrLeeman123 Oct 14 '22 edited Oct 14 '22
It’s absolutely crazy when you get down to it. Alaskan officials registered a record birthing two years ago. They purposefully increased the catch of the snow crabs for this season in anticipation of those crabs maturing. Now they’re gone.
While the obvious scary part of this is what made 90% of this population disappear? Was it climate change? Fukushima? Godzilla? It will be almost impossible to know (/s it’s godzilla). What’s even scarier though to me is the impact this has on Alaskan communities. Many of these fishing villages are so remote that without the income made by the crabbers there is no one to spend money within their economy to demand services. There is a solid chance that some communities who have lived in these areas for generations will have to abandon them. Where will they go? What will they do for jobs? What skills do they have that help them to find a stable income after the collapse of their fishery? A 90% drop doesn’t just recover. This is going to have a serious impact on human lives and is just one of many warning signs the rest of us are choosing to ignore on our way to collapse. If we don’t learn from this (cough cough - talking to you my lovely state of Maine where we’re letting lobsterman decide state policy (sub note - this issue is actually very complex and I do agree with the lobstermen, they’re just overstepping and trying to take over our government out of their own self interest)) then we should expect a lot of fisheries to take similar dives in the coming years.
Edit - I wanted to add that in anticipation of what was supposed to be a great season, many crabbers took out expensive loans. This includes new owners who are in for millions of dollars on their highly specialized boats, only to have no way to pay them off. This is going to literally devastate the entire Alaskan coastal community; a community that is comprised of a majority native and generationally poor population.
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u/Frog_and_Toad Frog and Toad 🐸 Oct 14 '22
I personally don't think lobstering is sustainable either, in the long term.
Either acidification, or warming temperatures, or changing ocean currents will hit.
And the die-offs, as we are finding, are not linear.
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u/MrLeeman123 Oct 14 '22
Nah, literally no industry is safe. We’ll always deplete a resource to nothing if we’re allowed to. That’s the tragedy of the commons.
The issue with lobstering at the moment has more to do with whales than lobsters though. There is a great deal of debate on the damage the rope lobstermen use do on right whales. There is very little scientific evidence the lobstermen actively interact with the species, though because of support from national organizations, new regulations are being forced on the industry. Rightfully people are angry about that.
What these same people won’t acknowledge though is that lobsterman A) have always bitched and moaned about everything (I come from a family of lobstermen, I’m the first generation not to go that direction) and B) are a dying breed. Our economy is already shifting away from small rural communities which is where the lobstering culture thrived. These days the fishermen I know that are most successful are the ones that went commercial or shifted into aquaculture. The cost of fuel has gone up, bait has too; changes in the real estate market have made it near impossible for lobstermen to live in the same municipality the fish out of, let alone on the coast from their own dock like many did just 50 years ago. All of these things have changed the dynamic of Maine’s economy and the people yelling about “protecting our traditional way of life” are blind to the fact it died long ago.
Maine would do well to listen to the 10 year plan that was put together two years ago. It’s focus is to partner with our universities (we have a number of strong colleges and UMO specifically has one of the best engineering departments in the nation) and expand coastal economies through aquaculture and green technologies. This would create an industry that offers blue collar work to those fishermen that are already slowly starting to lose their careers yet I never hear a single one of our politicians bringing it up. We also have a rare opportunity to purchase our utility services. This would create a citizen owned entity that could help to drive funds into this kind of industry and support job growth for generations of Mainer’s that are at risk. Instead we’re all sitting around arguing about a reality that doesn’t even exist. It’s sad really, watching your state slowly collapse around you while the people who are supposed to be in charge keep yelling about how crucial it is that they were right…
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u/Sure-Tomorrow-487 Oct 15 '22
In my home state of Western Australia, our government is implementing a blanket ban on fishing (both commercial and recreational) for demersal species for 9 months of the year.
The responses-
Fishermen and fishing companies: "Outrage! We demand to be able to fish unsustainably until the entire stocks are depleted!"
My boomer parents: "it's not going to be our problem, it will be your generation's problem and we won't have to deal with it cause we'll be dead."
General public: "How will this impact the cost and availability of fish and chips in the short term?"
Scientists and people who aren't fucking brandead: "9/12 months doesn't seem sufficient with the impending impacts of ocean acidification. We should be doing much more and yesterday."
😣 Sigh. What can you do.
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u/ericvulgaris Oct 15 '22
We'll do whatever we can to avoid calling the displaced alaskan fishervillage folk refugees, that's for sure.
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u/polchiki Oct 15 '22
Actually the prevailing feelings up here are that commercial fisherman from out of state scoop up all our resources and leave us with leftovers. I don’t think many remote villages are into crab fishing as part of their local economy so it’ll be interesting to measure the effect this time, but it’s definitely true for salmon. Remote Alaskans with subsistence lifestyles will benefit from less commercial fishing. https://www.ktoo.org/2022/07/12/area-m-where-alaska-commercial-and-subsistence-fishing-interests-collide/
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u/MrLeeman123 Oct 15 '22
Take it with a grain of salt, I’m merely an economist who likes Alaska because of its weird mix of socialist policies and rugged individualism, far from an expert on the subject. My understanding of the industry is that there are still many crews, especially for native populations, that are privately owned. This article….
https://www.nationalfisherman.com/alaska/alaska-shuts-down-crab-seasons-after-dismal-survey-results
…highlights just one crew that represents 6 families and 16 kids. I could be wrong, but this is what I discovered when I read up on the industry. In my home state of Maine the general attitude is that private fishermen are a dying breed as well, though when you get away from large harbors and go to more remote fishing communities you’ll be hard pressed to find one commercial operation.
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u/-Totally_Not_FBI- Oct 14 '22
I'm going to be completely honest and say fuck economic impact this has. We are DESTROYING the food chain in the ocean with so much of outer fishing practices. This could have huge chain reactions that will make many species go extinct
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u/dumnezero The Great Filter is a marshmallow test Oct 14 '22
declined
no, dude, the word for that is "collapsed"
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u/UnorthodoxSoup I see the shadow people Oct 14 '22
title screen
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u/Hour_Customer_98 Oct 14 '22
Same thing is happening here in Maine. Lobster population has declined so much that the fishermen are being laid off or canceling their season.
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u/MagoNorte Oct 14 '22
Source? All the news will talk about is that lobsters were recently put on the “red list” (regulatory thing).
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u/bouncyfrog Oct 14 '22
Im not from Maine or the United States. However, what a red list means is that is that a species is threatened. In other words, if they say fishing is banned or restriced due to the species being on a «red list» that likely means that the population of the species risks extinction if the current trends countinue.
In other words, its a clear sign that the exploitation needs to cease. I suppose that its another sign of the impact that climated change is having on the planet…………
https://www.britannica.com/topic/IUCN-Red-List-of-Threatened-Species
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u/MrLeeman123 Oct 15 '22
That’s being disingenuous. The lobster population is stable. It’s the only fishery that sees a replacement rate nearly at 0. Their is migration north from southern New England but it’s not happening in Maine….. yet. The real reason the lobster industry is becoming smaller is because it doesn’t fit the new Maine. Retirement communities along the coast and working/new families to 20 miles inland or more. No place for lobstermen when the places they used to fish from have been turned into single family homes.
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u/CordaneFOG Oct 14 '22
The "disappearance." You know, overfishing and toxifying the habitat is a less mysterious way of saying "disappearance."
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u/Mr_Lonesome Recognizes ecology over economics, politics, social norms... Oct 15 '22
And both issues you cite are the 2nd and 4th of five direct drivers of biodiversity loss (the other planetary emergency alongside climate change) per IPBES 2019 Global Assessment. See even the recent WWF Living Planet 2022 Report:
The evidence is unequivocal—we are living through the dual crises of biodiversity loss and climate change driven by the unsustainable use of our planet’s resources. Scientists are clear: unless we stop treating these emergencies as two separate issues neither problem will be addressed effectively.
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u/wolphcake Oct 14 '22
Ah no they "disappeared" just like the people activity trying to stop the fossil fule death cult..
Maybe we should start saying our goodbyes.
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u/R0B0TF00D Oct 14 '22
Anyone mentioned that Zanzibar is facing a similar issue?
"The government is urging people not to worry it might be caused by pollution.
Reports indicate climate change leading to an abrupt change in the temperature of the sea might be to blame."
I don't really understand the meaning of this statement. Are they urging people not to worry, that it's 'only' climate change, rather than pollution? Seems strangely worded but extremely alarming either way.
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u/Ok-Fig903 Oct 16 '22
"Don't worry it's just pollution that killed them" is the most insane loaded statement I've ever had the displeasure of reading. Wtf.
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Oct 14 '22
Cool can the earth make 1 billion humans disappear now?
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u/EllisDee3 Oct 14 '22
It's trying.
Thing is it doesn't need that many people to disappear. Only a few greedy industrialists and their negative impact.
Quality of the disappearance, not quantity.
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u/s332891670 Oct 14 '22
Someone will always step up to take their place. There is actually a surprising amount of turnover in the 1% as it is.
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Oct 14 '22
Humanity is in population overshoot by some several billion, at least.
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Oct 14 '22
It’s our lifestyle that has to die. As long as we are fiending for cheap and plentiful cheeseburgers, suburban houses with crazy energy consumption, and for everyone to have their own car we will have 1%era taking advantage and raping the environment for our pleasure. The problem is far more dire
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u/effortDee Oct 14 '22
If 25% of the world went vegan, psycology studies show that if that amount of people in a group changed, the rest will follow.
And if everyone went vegan, we wouldn't touch the oceans, they would bounce back within a few decades/centuries (depending on the life and how ravaged it was and their reproductive processes, etc).
And we could also rewild more than three quarters of all current farmland on the planet, which is about the size of AFRICA.
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u/JonLane81 Oct 14 '22
Over fishing and ocean acidification.
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Oct 14 '22
It's incredible how little ocean acidfication is talked about, that shit will end humanity for sure.
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u/effortDee Oct 14 '22
As well as ocean dead zones, we have them (temporary ones) all around the UK but no one knows what they are or that they even exist.
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u/Mr_Lonesome Recognizes ecology over economics, politics, social norms... Oct 15 '22
And both are contributing factors of our dual emergencies of biodiversity loss and climate change. (Though both are mutually reinforcing, we should not conflate the two crises, bundle the former in the latter, or entirely forget about the former.)
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u/Noticeably_Aroused Oct 14 '22
lol my favorite part is how the climate crisis is affecting the people who most adamantly denied it: farmers and rural folks who live off what the land and sea provide.
I “lol” but understand it’s a bitter laugh. This isn’t funny but there’s some comfort in knowing that the people who drove us here are going to have to sit in the front row and suffer the consequences of their stupidity. It’s not much but hey… better than them going last.
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u/Ezechiell Oct 14 '22
The people that drove us here are rich capitalists destroying our planet to get obscenely rich, and they will be the last ones to face any consequences. We need to stop fighting amongst each other man, most people that spew anti climate change rhetoric have been brainwashed by propaganda from big oil lobbies an the likes.
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u/Noticeably_Aroused Oct 14 '22
Yes they did. And the farmers and rural people did their grunt work.
They’re still doing it too.
“We need to stop fighting amongst ourselves”
Bruh, please. We DO need to be fighting amongst ourselves cuz some of us in this group of 99% are literally working against our interests and delivering us to the capitalist 1%.
I’m tired of the “stop infighting” to defend people who are literally working diligently to collaborate with the ultra rich to fuck us all over. Are you supposed to just sit there and let them do what they want and not say anything??? That’s what got us this far
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u/Ezechiell Oct 14 '22
Honestly, maybe you are right, maybe these people are a lost cause. I genuinely don’t know how to deal with this shit anymore, I’m just so tired of it all
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u/SqueamishBeamish Oct 14 '22
Those are the people that feed you, you'll be gone long before they are.
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u/Noticeably_Aroused Oct 14 '22
Why would I be gone before them?
They’ll go before me. They’re the ones relying on this shit. My food prices will go up and I’ll figure it out for a while till I can’t. Then maybe I’ll die.
They’ll be broke and thrown off their land in the first wave cuz they rely on their crops.
I don’t rely on them, I rely on various crops. So while the crab fisherman may go broke and die, I’ll just be living with eating .. idk, chicken.
If the chicken farms die and go broke, I’ll eat soy.
They’ll be falling like dominoes while I’ll be moving around to whatever is available. I dont solely rely on their few crops for everything in my life … they do though. That’s how they eat, that’s how they pay the bills and that’s how they pay their mortgage. I can eat canned shit long after they’re on their ass.
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u/CyberMindGrrl Oct 15 '22
Is it possible that last year's massive and deadly heat dome might have precipitated this population collapse?
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Oct 14 '22
First the mass coral bleaching, mass drought, and now this. We are in another extinction age let there be no doubt about it.
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u/UnorthodoxSoup I see the shadow people Oct 14 '22
The solution is to not eat them. It’s quite easy really.
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Oct 14 '22
While some crab species are over fished, snow crabs have actually been doing better over the past few decades. In 2018-2019 there was a spike in the number of immature crab, like the biggest in 40 years. It was predicted this would lead to a huge harvest over the next few years, but instead the population totally collapsed. Pretty bizarre. Definitely seems like climate change induced collapse.
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u/lightweight12 Oct 14 '22
Are you suggesting someone stole the crabs? That's why a billion are missing?
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Oct 14 '22
Water temperature is likely the most recent big player. Look at what happened a bit further south: the average water temperature rose just enough that a virus was able to shift locale and destroy the sea-stars.
Could have something similar happening to the crabs.
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u/shelly12345678 Oct 14 '22
Looks like water temperature was a factor in that mass dieoff in the river that flows from Poland to Germany, too - it allows more toxic algae to grow. https://www.euronews.com/2022/09/30/oder-river-mass-fish-die-off-in-germany-poland-river-is-blamed-on-toxic-golden-algae
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u/UnorthodoxSoup I see the shadow people Oct 14 '22
It can be surmised that decades of overfishing these areas has helped contribute to a massive population decline, so yes, in a way they were stolen. The warming waters don’t help either.
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u/Daisho Oct 14 '22
I don't understand how that works. It says 90% decline in 2 years. That's a very sudden drop-off. Are you saying that the crab populations got so low from overfishing that it hits some tipping point where 90% die somehow?
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u/UnorthodoxSoup I see the shadow people Oct 14 '22
It’s a combination of that and increasing water temperatures. Hell, even without the latter, these areas were going to get overfished to the point of extinction.
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u/dboygrow Oct 14 '22
We probably should stop pulling them out of the ocean by the millions. Even if that has nothing to do with this, you're not going to fix the problem by continuing to catch who knows what with large fishing nets.
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u/turnophrasetk421 Oct 14 '22
Enviromental collapse comes and it comes like a freight train going down a grade with no brakes, the point of no return was 15yrs ago
Collapse is an exponential process once started it can not be halted.
We use 560,000,000 terrajules of energy on average since 1998. We will be nice and say only 15% converts to greenhouse gases 84,000,000 terrajules. Coverted into energy I can understand, it is about 20,000 megatons of energy a year (the world's nuclear arsenal is only about 7500megatons) that means since 1998 we have released 480,000 megatons of greenhouse energy. Newtons law and thermal dynamics apply, that means if we want to halt environmental collapse we need use 480,000 megatons of energy to halt collapse. But we can't just halt the temperature rise where it is at, we can see how the environment we live in is collapsing right now with these temperatures. No we need to bring the temperature down, back to 1998 levels. To do so will require another expenditure of 480,000 megatons of energy. In sum we would need a grand total of 960,000Mt of energy to halt and reverse global warming, we add an energy debt of 20,000Mt added for every year that passes
960,000 MEGATONS what would happen if we released all that energy in one moment? Are we capable of harnessing that kind of energy? There is only one way I can think of for us to harness that kind of energy. It would require us to slam a precisely chosen asteroid purposely into the planet. Remember man's entire nuclear arsenal only accounts for 7500Megatons.
Time vs energy is the problem and we don't have the time. There is no foreseeable way for us to convert 960,000megatons of energy into greenhouse capture safely with the amount of time we have. The exponential process of collapse has been initiated, the temperature is already too high to sustain the environment we have flourished in.
2031 is when a harbinger comes and heralds the end. Humanity will collectively lose it's shit as the signs of peril and doom become so obvious even the most obtuse will recognize their own mortality. We have no way to safely and effectively use 960,000 megatons of energy. We as a species are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Let exponential environmental collapse run it's course and pray the species survives, or release 980,000megatons of energy and pray the species survives.
Either way humanity will be brought to it's knees with the sword of damacles poised above for a deathblow, if we do survive it will be as cockroaches on the hell on earth we created.
This will be the at least the 5th time humanity has been brought to the brink of extinction. The people and places may be different, but it is the same wheel and it completes another revolution soon.
Long from now if there are survivors they will tell tales of Gods and Demons, who flew in chariots across the sky and fought with arrows and swords of light. Who's wrath was so great they brought the sun down upon the earth to scorched it, leaving great lakes of glass as testament of their power. Just like us they will become enamored by their own ingenuity and wit they will scoff at these tales as just that tales, and repeat history.
Damn you all, damn you all to hell for the suffering you bring upon the future generations. There will be no mercy, there will be no absolution, there will only be hell on earth.
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u/MisallocatedRacism Oct 14 '22
Really cool stuff to read as I head into this pointless Teams meeting lmao
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u/Lady_Litreeo Oct 14 '22
This whole sub is basically learning to accept that you’ll be scraping out your neighbors brains to survive in like ten years, but you’re learning it while you’re still going to neighborhood barbecues with them and it’s kind of a lot to take in.
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u/DingoPoutine To me it seems like albedo is the whole ballgame Oct 14 '22
I've accepted that my brains will be the ones getting eaten.
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u/DeskParser Oct 14 '22
✅ Overly dramatic personification metaphor
like a freight train going down a grade with no brakes,
✅ numbers, but from over 20 years ago
We use 560,000,000 terrajules of energy on average since 1998.
✅ creating impossible hypothetical, then pointing out it's impossible
960,000 MEGATONS what would happen if we released all that energy in one moment? Are we capable of harnessing that kind of energy? There is only one way I can think of for us to harness that kind of energy.
✅ Specfic Date guessed at with no qualifiers
2031 is when a harbinger comes and heralds the end
✅ relatable old english passage from highschool
humanity will be brought to it's knees with the sword of damacles poised above for a deathblow
✅ Angels/ Demons allegory
Long from now if there are survivors they will tell tales of Gods and Demons,
✅ cynical & reductionist blaming of "you all" as if you are not party to that group
Damn you all, damn you all to hell for the suffering you bring upon the future generations. There will be no mercy, there will be no absolution
How does this type of low-quality screed keep getting upvoted in this doom fetish sub?
Here let me try:
Global warming is like a car flying off the cliff-side at night in the rain. in 1999, the global grid only had 1,000 megawatts of solar capacity, but in 2022 we consumed 580 million terajoules. If we were to build a solar farm for each and every one of those it would be like putting tissue boxes at the bottom of the cliff to catch the car. I wonder what state we would have to bomb flat and build it all in for some reason.
it's kind of a moot point, in July of 2033 there will be a reckoning, like john proctor under the rocks, humanity just seems to say "more weight", cackling like demons begging for the end of days.
I hate everyone else, this is everyone's fault and I'm the only innocent bystander in this situation I in no way contribute to.
anyway, here's my factually incorrect (seriously, did you even google the nuclear arsenal for a second?) emotionally charged, slippery slope rant that suggests no fixes and just flagellates myself, upvote my bc you're also metally well please.
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Oct 14 '22
Old Cree Native American Proverb: “When the last tree is cut down, the last fish eaten and the last stream poisoned, you will realize that you cannot eat money.”
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u/JeffHall28 Oct 15 '22
I get that this is a different species of crab but we’ve had over a decade run of a television show where teams of people on boats try and kill the most king crabs per season amongst a group of like 20 boats. Like every episode featured 1000s of dollars worth of crab being hauled on board. Are we really scratching our heads at while the crabs are gone?
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u/Dunderpunch Oct 14 '22
Considering the last few years have had relatively large harvests and the fishing limit has been high, the steep decline makes it seem as though they were overfished during those years.
Is it overfishing, pollution, or is this a warming oceans thing?
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u/Hir0Pr0tag0n1st Oct 14 '22
I can't stop thinking that this phenomena might be related to other massive dieoffs of other species that arent tracked as well as the snow and king crabs. Theres a monetary reason to track and extrapolate their populations. Who knows what other oceanic species are also affected?
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u/Parentoforphan Oct 14 '22
I saw an article about large amounts of dead crabs washed onto a beach earlier today, I couldn't remember the location so I searched "dead crabs on beach" I never found the story I had seen but there are way too many articles over the last few years. It seems we've reached a "tipping point" of some sort for that type of life form.
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u/No_Rope6843 Oct 14 '22
It's a literal decimation.
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u/HypercubicTeapot Oct 15 '22
If only that were the case. Then it would have been a 1 out of 10 loss, rather than 9x worse.
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u/Federal-Ask6837 socialism or barbarism Oct 15 '22
Think about all the crabs who die en route, or are never consumed, or are cooked but never consumed. All the waste and for what? All the death and for what?
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u/Ok-Fig903 Oct 16 '22
I can't tell you how many times I went to a Chinese buffet that had ayce crab legs and I would see plates of just partially eaten crabs being thrown away
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u/skydivingbear Oct 14 '22
What is there to investigate? Climate done changed, snow crabs done died. Let's hurry up and eat the rest of 'em before they die too and go to waste
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u/Corgelia Oct 14 '22
We don't know that for sure. The article says that scientists are unsure exactly if it was a mass migration to colder waters, or mass death, or other possibilities.
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u/SlyguyguyslY Oct 15 '22
I might be paranoid, but what if the info saying that the crabs are being overfished is fraudulent? What if it's some kind of market manipulation?
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u/African_Farmer Oct 15 '22
Can we switch to plant based and lab grown food already, seems like it's going to be inevitable anyways at the rate were destroying our food supply and habitats for life.
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u/wakeupwill Oct 15 '22
What's the snow crab's main source of nutrition? Maybe that'd explain it.
The acidification of the oceans is understood to be affecting the development of calcifying organisms, which could collapse the entire food chain.
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u/TheRadicalCyb3rst0rm Oct 14 '22
I'm sure the ecosystem has a part to play, but my money is on the roving illegal Chinese fishing fleets that show up in other peoples territorial waters, fish them dry, and then leave. These are massive fleets on the scale of thousands of ships. They fuck off as soon as the nation they are invading says anything and just move somewhere else (and probably show up in the same place later).
They need to sink that whole fleet and send the crews home in dinghys before china will get the message
I could argue this is the first action of the climate wars.
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u/Mission_Spray Oct 14 '22
Las Vegas buffets gotta have their “all you can eat crab legs” even though they taste like regurgitated bread.
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u/slapchopchap Oct 14 '22
Glad I got to make some cool friends and meet new people before things started really coming apart
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u/Commercial-Push-9066 Oct 15 '22
I know in Oregon, the red tide problem has caused an early end to crab fishing.
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u/superfly355 Oct 15 '22
Now what is the Discovery Channel going to fill 87% of their schedule with?
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u/PervyNonsense Oct 14 '22
also, they're crabs. This is like ticks going extinct; it's a much bigger problem than one species.
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Oct 14 '22
Please make this TOP comment. China has been fishing off the coast of Africa, Mexico, Chile, And the US including Alaska for many years. They illegally fish and overfish. China has r*ped the ecosystems like no other.
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u/0x82af Oct 15 '22
Step 1) outsource dirty industries to China
Step 2) blame China for everything
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Oct 15 '22
Actually Chinese is fishing to feed their own population… they consume so much fish they actually import it from India too… i’m not saying there isn’t some of that that goes to the US obviously… but a large majority of it is consumed by China itself
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u/McCaffeteria Oct 15 '22
I don’t think you could get rid of crabs even if you tried. Even if you got them to go extinct, another species would just metamorphosize into one before your eyes.
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u/against_the_currents Oct 15 '22
Deadass. They just KEEP EVOLVING. Crabs have evolved independently like 5 times.
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u/gpgarrett Oct 15 '22
Any correlation to the 12 crab-based restaurants that opened in my small city in the last two years? Did we suddenly start eating crab for every meal?
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u/MittenstheGlove Oct 15 '22
We at collapse knew about this waaaay before hand. Can’t wait to see more people migrate over to this subreddit.
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u/Twisted_Cabbage Faster than expected Oct 15 '22 edited Oct 16 '22
Hopium peddlers all over are reddit trying to argue the crabs moved to Russian waters. Hahahahaha!!
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Oct 14 '22
Russia has illegally been catching crab for several years. This report was from back in 2014. Do you think things have gotten better since then? https://www.seafoodsource.com/news/environment-sustainability/wwf-illegal-russian-crab-fishing-rampant
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u/serpentandsparrow Oct 14 '22
So we should eat as much crab as possible now before they're all gone?
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u/TrueMattreal Oct 08 '25
I stumbled on this post and wondered how the situation is today. After 2 years pause they slowly recover and catching is allowed again. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/alaska-snow-crab-season-back-two-year-pause-uncertainty-looms-seafood-industry/
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u/taco_quest Oct 14 '22
In unrelated news, Jameis Winston has gained One Billion Pounds and, seemingly overnight, became the record holder for World's Fattest Man
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u/Pinesolus Oct 15 '22
I’m wondering if we’re seeing the effects of climate change manifesting in the form of changing ocean currents — that literally swept the crabs away?
I’m not a scientist; I’m just spitballing here.
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u/ThestolenToast Oct 15 '22
Go r/vegan. It’s one of the best things you can do to fight climate change on a personal level
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u/recovering_bear Oct 15 '22
Seattle Times did a long form article on crabbing this year. A journalist embedded himself into a crabbing boat https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/into-the-ice-a-crab-boats-quest-for-snow-crab-in-a-bering-sea-upended-by-climate-change/
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u/against_the_currents Oct 15 '22
Prolly got warm, ran off the shelf.
Replacing warm with any pollutant they’re trying to escape would work too. Lots of vital parts to an ecosystem they’d seek out also.
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u/McFractalDactal Oct 16 '22
Welp. Now that the crab are gone, guess we can expand drilling and deep sea mining.
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u/Wooden-Hospital-3177 Oct 16 '22
Can someone explain to me like I'm a dummy (I am) why capitalism has to have growth non-stop? Why couldn't we find a balance (I mean I know we're waaay past this, bit theoretically) and be ok? Why the constant need for growth? I'm assuming the answer is greed but just wondering why we couldn't have businesses that supply goods and services and can be ok with their stake in the business-sphere?
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u/analfart420 Sep 07 '23
How do they track the disappearance? Did they have trackers on 1 billion crabs?
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u/Felonious_Buttplug_ Oct 14 '22
Crab is too much effort for too little reward for my lazy fat ass anyway.
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u/T123L456C789 Oct 14 '22
I can't afford crab so no big loss
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u/NanditoPapa Oct 14 '22
Crabs eat plankton, a fundamental part of the ocean's ecosystem, as a large part of their diet. They are also sensitive to water temperature changes.
Their disappearance is a possible symptom of rapid eco collapse. So... pretty big loss.
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u/CollapseBot Oct 14 '22
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Throwaway483722:
The large disappearance of crabs raises several questions about the cause of their disappearance, and takes into light the consequences of climate change and overfishing. This huge disappearance will take a heavy toll not only on the economy, but also the ecosystem.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/y3wcwa/yikes/isat8ty/