Bycatch is not always dead. Google around for the recent case of a whale caught in a japanese net for weeks. They eventually took action to drown it as "bycatch" and chop it up for meat rather than let it go.
I saw the preview for this last night and on the one hand I want to watch it because I feel that it’s important to know this stuff, but on the other hand I really just want to bury my head in the sand. Over the past year I’ve realized just how much we are killing the planet and how powerless I am so do anything at all about it and it’s depressing me every time I think about it and not in a figurative sense.
You are not powerless - ethical buying, if everybody did that then things would change as companies run on money, so vote with your wallet. Effort to research and may find in some area's it's down to picking the best of a bad choice, but little by little mindsets are changing and you do have the power.
Business runs on money - vote with your wallet as that is your power, use it, don't loose it.
That’s a nice thought and I’ve tried that before but the “if everybody did that” is the key. I can bend over backwards to only buy local organic food just to have the farm driven out of business by a Walmart Super Center and watch as a new mega container ship, new mega mall, new mega church gets built. I don’t think I spend nearly enough money on retail stuff that would actually tip the scales or even make anyone notice that I stopped shopping at the “unethical” stores.
> I spend nearly enough money on retail stuff that would actually tip the scales or even make anyone notice that I stopped shopping at the “unethical” stores.
As an individual - indeed that is probably so, but you do get to feel less helpless and gets down too a balance of moral dilemma and feeling helpless.
I understand where you are coming from and am not trying to suggest that these smaller actions are enough, you should keep looking for more, but still the smaller choices you make do add up.
I honestly think the only way we are going to solve this is with Genetic engineering and manufacturing on a global scale. We need to create self sustaining food sources that provide enough of our needs to allow natural resources especially the ocean time to heal and replenish itself. Things like the AquAdvantage salmon, lab grown meat on a massive scale and a massive marketing campaign to quash the anti-gmo mindset that is making the world hesitate to go all in.
We are not going to heal the planet by everyone consuming less or driving less or any of the million things that they encourage you to do to save it. Science is going to be the only solution as the pandemic has proven that people really are not going to make choices that inconvenience them, we need to provide alternatives that are just as enticing but are also financially attractive. In addition, even if we convinced everyone to cut their consumption of everything by 25%, so what; in a few years there will be more people rendering that 25% savings moot. Science is the only way.
>vote with your wallet as that is your power, use it, don't loose it.
When you tell people to "vote with your wallet", you are implicitly admitting that people with bigger wallets have more votes. Literally millions of times more, in many cases.
Don't vote with your wallet. involve yourself in local government, because legislation is the only way to solve problems like this.
Everyone votes (not specifically with their wallet) but with their choices. Perhaps there are some people who worry about the planet but continue to do it harm and not consider changing their behaviour. i would also translate voting with your wallet "put your money where your mouth is", instead of any concept of power differences between people, but thats just me.
Not true for lot of cases. Every time you decide carry your water bottle and not buy a new plastic bottle, Bill Gates isn't buying 1000s of more bottles. For lot of consumables, gap between median and 99th percentile is very low.
> When you tell people to "vote with your wallet", you are implicitly admitting that people with bigger wallets have more votes.
Seeing the world as it is, is a precondition to changing it. You don't have to like it, but you do have to understand it.
In this case I both disagree and agree.
Disagree: Yes, rich people have a lot more money. But they don't eat more food than anyone else. Their threat to not buy certain fish is worth about as much as mine.
Agree: These kind of boycotts rarely accomplish much. The fishing system needs to be reformed away from free for all hunting, and legislation must do that. Iceland and New Zealand has decent systems in place now.
> Yes, rich people have a lot more money. But they don't eat more food than anyone else. Their threat to not buy certain fish is worth about as much as mine.
The issue is that rich people are both buying and supplying the fish that anyone else eventually eats.
You can do a bunch of research to figure out the best and most ethically sourced fish providers, but that takes a bunch of time and effort. It's not something you can reasonably rely on consumers to do. That's because most consumers either don't care or they care more about the absolute price than the source.
This comes up all the time with child labor and sweatshops. These big corporations have a giant supply network that makes it really hard to figure out where something comes from. Yes, maybe the shirt was sewn ethically but the cotton for the shirt was not. How would you know?
It's the same problem with fish. Unless there is a capital incentive (through regulation) to force a company to ethically source goods, they'll sooner turn a blind eye than fix the problem. That's because they know it's nearly impossible for an end consumer be informed about their ethics lapses.
So, while a rich person uninvolved with fisheries has little say in how their fish are sourced, rich people are most certainly in charge of which sources are ultimately used if they have fish in their supply chains. Those are the rich people with way more power than an individual consumer.
Your not going to ever convince enough people to stop eating seafoood. Goverment needs to regulate better and ban imports that can’t prove they don’t have excessive by catch
Advice that tor several millions of people in this planet, will translate directly to "live less, die younger" or "starve your family to death, is good for your karma" (and your suicide will be highly appreciated for my own family).
Lets get serious, please. Stopping to eat seafood overnight would mean having a mass genocide in the planet in less than a year. Moreover, all cultures having many very long-lived people eat lots of seafood products. Is among the best human food known in the planet. This advice is totally out of any sensible discussion about our future.
Changing the subject, I have previously explained here how difficult and error prone is to study age in sharks, and my opinion has not changed a millimeter. I still would suggest to take this 400-yo values with a ton of arctic salt.
I was just reading the wikipedia article for ocean sunfish the other day, and apparently they can be up to 90% of the total catch for what are ostensibly swordfish-catching operations in the Mediterranean: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_sunfish#Human_interactio....
My first paid job was an internship at a research institute where I had to examine buckets of bycatch and count how many of various species had been caught. I think it was from shrimp fishing and the bycatch was just small fish (1 to 6 inches).
For some fish, we would figure out their age by looking at some tiny bone pieces under a microscope and counting rings, similar to tree rings.
I have no idea how I ended up in that job, I have no interest in fish or fishing or the ocean.
I already know it doesn't bring up China's global fishing flotillas, who overfished China so roam the world stripping other coastlines, even protected areas like the Galapagos. One of the top reason for overfishing today. Or does it talk about this?
Was just thinking this. The tragedy of this is completely missed in the tone of the article, as if this is just some fun new thing we learned about sharks.
I was literally asking my Google Home last night what the longest living vertebrate was and it told me the Greenland shark.
Had a whole conversation about it over dinner, arguing about how accurate we think these age-establishing methods are.
Though the more interesting part of our conversation (I would say) was wondering how ages work out in practice. For example why do the vast majority of animals not live beyond 20 years, even when we try to keep them alive as long as possible (dogs)? If the environment was different would longevity be different for all species, e.g more oxygen in the atmosphere or a longer day-night cycle? Etc.
baader-meinhoff has been a neologism for a long time now, enough so that it isn't really a neoligism anymore, and we just collectively moved onto accepting it as the name of this phenomenon.
there's a lot of these sorts of in-sphere jargon; you'll start picking them up if you peruse the more esoteric threads on tech news blog aggregator sites like this.
like, if one of the original repliers in a thread is "why is this on HN", there's an increased chance imho that you'll run into this sort of techno-cultural salon effect.
Not OP, but I pretty much only know two effects: Baader–Meinhof effect and Streisand effect. So I guess the answer for knowing this particular one is just that it is famous.
Animals with slower heart rates tend to be longer lived. An interesting sidenote are bats, which have heart rates about the same as similarly sized small mammals like mice, but due to their nightly torpor state where their heart rate is significantly lowered, they tend to live 20-25 years opposed to the 3-4 mice usually live.
For what it's worth - I'm a firm believer that what is always healthy for your body, is not always healthy for your mind.
Some of the most productive people I know eat nothing but donuts and coffee, and don't exercise at all. They're smart, driven, and highly successful.
Meanwhile, I know a lot of people who put exercise and food as a priority, and don't seem nearly as sharp or as successful. Maybe this all washes out, with age.
Point is - do whatever works for you. Don't let some blog, or some person on the internet, tell you how to perform optimally!
I did see a cardiologist after COVID-19, he did prescribe some medicine to "calm my heart down a bit", I don't meet actual criteria for tachycardia and he agree in the end that I can postpone medicine if I start any aerobic exercise -- which I still didn't, except for VR games, which can be really intense, but alas, I don't have the time for or discipline.
You heart might survive, but your joints probably won't. The stress you put on them when running/sporting when young will come back to haunt you later on!
Birds are metabolically much more active than mammals yet many have long lifespans. This prompted another finding that the number of cortical neurons can explain a large part of the variation in lifespan across species.
Flight gives birds greater protection from predation, which makes evolution towards biologies that pay a higher metabolic cost for greater longevity more advantageous. The same thing applies to larger animals, like cows, which tend to have longer lifespans once you normalize for heart/metabolic rate.
By far the most important reason dictating lifespan is evolvability - the ability to adapt genetically [0].
This has so great effect that it's easy to observe even in a simple computer simulations. If you don't adapt and the environment is changing, then you go extinct.
Think about this sharks and how much their environment has changed since they were born. As a spices they will have a very hard time adapting to the changes we induce in the environment. While small animals that have lifespan in weeks, months or few years will be adapting a lot faster. E.g. in one generation of this shark a mouse will go trough up to 900 generations with up to 12 offspring in each generation.
This shark probably will go extinct and mice will thrive.
Interesting consequence of this effect is that our lifespan is most likely not dictated by any fundamental limitations of biological machinery to maintain us healthy indefinitely.
A lot more likely is that we are evolutionary designed to get old and die.
I’m not educated on this topic at all, but wouldn’t birth rate be more relevant than aging? If this shark lives 400 years but has kids often, it could also go through 900 generations like the mice. Presumably if the environment isn’t favorable then the old members of the species would die off anyway.
The older living sharks would use up resources that the younger ones need to thrive. So it’s way more efficient to get the older population out of the way sooner.
The longevity of the Greenland shark, humans and other long living animals, is in spite of evolutionary pressure to reproduce, raise the next generation and die.
Consider that a litter of sharks born in year 100 would be very closely related to a litter sharks born in year 400. Imagine the same pair of sharks mate over that span of time, those siblings are even closer. To me, evolution is a very deep graph of descendants. The scenario you propose is a very wide and shallow graph.
To counter this a little, there is a jelly fish Turritopsis Dohrnii which is biological immortal. Those jelly fish and sponges (which can get very old too) are very, very old/successful species.
> For example why do the vast majority of animals not live beyond 20 years, even when we try to keep them alive as long as possible (dogs)? If the environment was different would longevity be different for all species, e.g more oxygen in the atmosphere or a longer day-night cycle? Etc.
A lot of animals just don't need to live longer than 1, 2, or 20 years to reproduce. There is no evolutionary pressure to do so. From our human perceptive life is valuable on its own merit, but nature doesn't see it that way. All it really cares about is replicating those precious DNA molecules, and different species have different strategies for that. For some species, it takes a long time to produce offspring. Whales, for example, live a long time as well. They're huge and it takes a long time for them to become fully grown, find mates, produce offspring, etc. There is a lot of evolutionary pressure to live long. Humans live comparatively long because it takes a long time for individuals to acquire the skills we use as a survival strategy.
Not too much is known about the lives of Greenland sharks, but there are probably some evolutionary pressures for them to live long lives.
>Humans live comparatively long because it takes a long time for individuals to acquire the skills we use as a survival strategy
Species need to live until reproduce, maybe several times, and see the next generation into being able to live on their own. That is about 35-50 for humans (granted the 15-20/generation - relatively prolonged maturation period given our size - is primarily because of the brain/skills development you mentioned). Additionally, because of the complexity of societal organization, skills and other knowledge, we've got boost from having the grand generation around to help and transfer knowledge and experience. That brought us to 60-70.
Lifespan is correlated with the time it takes to reproduce. If a species needs a lot of time to reproduce, then only the individuals who live longer will procreate, passing down the genes of long life. On the other hand, if it is too quick to reproduce, genes for short lifespan will abound, pressuring the shorter lifespans across the population.
One individual out of 28 is known to be 400 years old. There is a subadult population bulge. Any way of estimating natural life spans from this? Could be some very, very old sharks out there. I wonder how big the 400yr old one is, relative to max known size.
You’d need to know the probability of death as a function of chronological age.
If the probability is constant, you can model the lifespan as an exponential decay - there is no real upper limit, but the population of older individuals is very small.
For most animals the probability increases as they age, and becomes very high towards the end of their life, but this is not the case for all animals.
"(probability) becomes very high towards the end of their life."
This is, ultimately, what we want to know. At what age do they start to die of old age? Oldest living vertebrate is interesting, but I think it's mostly interesting because of what it says about the species?
Is it possible that a large vertebrate doesn't have an old age point, where probability of death is very high?
What startles me is how much we've changed their environment in that single individual's lifetime. That shark was the equivalent of a human teenager when the industrial revolution started.
Other than made it warmer and more acidic, added a bunch of plastic garbage and removed a significant percentage of its inhabitants, yeah I guess not much.
Most of the human + livestock biomass is utterly dependent on Haber-Bosch process derived nitrogen fertiliser, produced via nonrenewable natural gas (methane, a fossil fuel).
What does displaced mean? Why are terrestrial vertebrates preferred in this analysis? Why is the horizontal scale in that chart nonlinear? What is peakoilbarrel.com?
The goalposts seem to have shifted from the person I replied to.
Returning to your original question, I answered that biomass is a more useful metric than strict census, as biomass gives an indication of net metabolism, energy throughput, carbon fixation capacity (for plants / primary producers), and tissue synthesis and maintenance (for animals / secondary+ consumers). It's denoted by population * mean bodyweight, and normalises measures across species with wildly differing bodyweight. It avoids the trap of focusing exclusively on "telegenic megafauna" (lions, tigers, giraffes, rhinos, elephants, pandas, etc.). Vertebrates and land-based, probably because they're easier to assess. (Estimates of marine consumer biomass trends are similar though more vague and harder to pin down.)
If you look at the linked chart, humans have increased net terrestrial biomass, yes, but virtually all of it now exists as just eight species: cattle, pigs, chickens, sheep, horses, goats, cas, and dogs. Variants of the original chart highlight this.
- Naturally-occurring vertebrate bodymass surviving on sustainable current-process nitrogen fixation has fallen precipitously, by ~99%.
- Net genetic diversity within and among those populations has similarly fallen, possibly below sustainable values for many species. Numerous species have gone extinct, many previously small, some prolific (passenger pigeon).
- A terrestrial vertebrate population of thousands of mammals and tens of thousands of overall species ... is now utterly dominated by about nine species. (The eight livestock/pet classes above, and humans.) A few other human symbiotes (rats, mice, deer) have also likely increased. All are dependent on nonsustainable nitrogen fixation among other nonrenewable or nonsustainable practices and inputs.
- Dense and interlinked populations are breeding grounds for novel trans-species disease, among other hygenic consequences. These affect both humans and livestock. The principle can be extended to plant onocrops as well, from tobacco to trees (in the non /r/trees sense, generally).
Aha, so humans have reduced the diversity of species on the planet. That seems plausible to me (and even compatible with the original "reduced inhabitants" phrase that was used by the other poster earlier). Thanks for the all the information.
I wonder if we will be remembered by future biologists as cyanobacteria are remembered by our biologists today.
... which doesn't taste nearly as bad as you've heard and is produced in limited quantities only as result of the few bycatch sharks accidentally netted each year.
I can't stand the ammonia flavor of Chondrichthyes, plus the bioaccumulation of heavy metals, mercury, ciguatoxins, the toxic amounts of vitamin A in liver...
There are many excellent seafood but this is dog-food grade at best, not decent food for humans unless you haven't anything else. Cooking with urine would be healthier providing the same flavor without the extra-poisons. Pretty disgusting stuff.
The Ming clam the article refers to as comparison was not 508 years but 405 to 410 according to the linked reference. So I'd say that shark is definitely a strong contender for the overall title.
And the specimen they said was older than the oldest known vertibrate was actually about the same age - potentially younger, considering the lack of a notarized birth certificate.
"The sharks' livers were once used for machine oil, and they were killed in great numbers before a synthetic alternative was found and the demand fell"
Fascinating that the fate of these sharks depended on a completely unrelated technological advance.
Whales were killed huge numbers for whale oil during the industrial revolution. The oil was oil lamps and to make soap. (over 10-20 million gallons per year during the peak)
Ambergris is a different product that does not involve the killing of the animal necessarily. Needs to mature for several years in the sea after being defecated by the whale.
When I went to Alska, it was fascinating to learn that all these small trees where actually hundreds of years old. The cold makes them grow very slowly.
I wonder if anyone has ever looked for a correlation between the average lifespan of a species and some distance factor from humans and the effect we have on the environment.
112 comments
[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 144 ms ] threadNice job- the shark had done just fine for ~400 years.
It has some staggering numbers regarding the amount of by-catch caught every day
Business runs on money - vote with your wallet as that is your power, use it, don't loose it.
As an individual - indeed that is probably so, but you do get to feel less helpless and gets down too a balance of moral dilemma and feeling helpless.
We are not going to heal the planet by everyone consuming less or driving less or any of the million things that they encourage you to do to save it. Science is going to be the only solution as the pandemic has proven that people really are not going to make choices that inconvenience them, we need to provide alternatives that are just as enticing but are also financially attractive. In addition, even if we convinced everyone to cut their consumption of everything by 25%, so what; in a few years there will be more people rendering that 25% savings moot. Science is the only way.
When you tell people to "vote with your wallet", you are implicitly admitting that people with bigger wallets have more votes. Literally millions of times more, in many cases.
Don't vote with your wallet. involve yourself in local government, because legislation is the only way to solve problems like this.
Seeing the world as it is, is a precondition to changing it. You don't have to like it, but you do have to understand it.
In this case I both disagree and agree.
Disagree: Yes, rich people have a lot more money. But they don't eat more food than anyone else. Their threat to not buy certain fish is worth about as much as mine.
Agree: These kind of boycotts rarely accomplish much. The fishing system needs to be reformed away from free for all hunting, and legislation must do that. Iceland and New Zealand has decent systems in place now.
Otherwise completely agree.
The issue is that rich people are both buying and supplying the fish that anyone else eventually eats.
You can do a bunch of research to figure out the best and most ethically sourced fish providers, but that takes a bunch of time and effort. It's not something you can reasonably rely on consumers to do. That's because most consumers either don't care or they care more about the absolute price than the source.
This comes up all the time with child labor and sweatshops. These big corporations have a giant supply network that makes it really hard to figure out where something comes from. Yes, maybe the shirt was sewn ethically but the cotton for the shirt was not. How would you know?
It's the same problem with fish. Unless there is a capital incentive (through regulation) to force a company to ethically source goods, they'll sooner turn a blind eye than fix the problem. That's because they know it's nearly impossible for an end consumer be informed about their ethics lapses.
So, while a rich person uninvolved with fisheries has little say in how their fish are sourced, rich people are most certainly in charge of which sources are ultimately used if they have fish in their supply chains. Those are the rich people with way more power than an individual consumer.
Don't eat seafood. The more that don't, the less fishing humanity will do.
Advice that tor several millions of people in this planet, will translate directly to "live less, die younger" or "starve your family to death, is good for your karma" (and your suicide will be highly appreciated for my own family).
Lets get serious, please. Stopping to eat seafood overnight would mean having a mass genocide in the planet in less than a year. Moreover, all cultures having many very long-lived people eat lots of seafood products. Is among the best human food known in the planet. This advice is totally out of any sensible discussion about our future.
Changing the subject, I have previously explained here how difficult and error prone is to study age in sharks, and my opinion has not changed a millimeter. I still would suggest to take this 400-yo values with a ton of arctic salt.
https://old.reddit.com/r/rant/comments/5shm1r/why_i_hate_the...
For some fish, we would figure out their age by looking at some tiny bone pieces under a microscope and counting rings, similar to tree rings.
I have no idea how I ended up in that job, I have no interest in fish or fishing or the ocean.
I was literally asking my Google Home last night what the longest living vertebrate was and it told me the Greenland shark.
Had a whole conversation about it over dinner, arguing about how accurate we think these age-establishing methods are.
Though the more interesting part of our conversation (I would say) was wondering how ages work out in practice. For example why do the vast majority of animals not live beyond 20 years, even when we try to keep them alive as long as possible (dogs)? If the environment was different would longevity be different for all species, e.g more oxygen in the atmosphere or a longer day-night cycle? Etc.
Wouldn't that be more an example of the Baader Meinhof effect?
there's a lot of these sorts of in-sphere jargon; you'll start picking them up if you peruse the more esoteric threads on tech news blog aggregator sites like this.
like, if one of the original repliers in a thread is "why is this on HN", there's an increased chance imho that you'll run into this sort of techno-cultural salon effect.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9316546/
Animals with slower heart rates tend to be longer lived. An interesting sidenote are bats, which have heart rates about the same as similarly sized small mammals like mice, but due to their nightly torpor state where their heart rate is significantly lowered, they tend to live 20-25 years opposed to the 3-4 mice usually live.
If I am regularly running, my resting heart rate at night drops into the upper 30s. During the day sitting down, 45-50.
If I haven't been running (for a week or longer) it picks back up in to the mid 40s at night, and around 60 for normal sitting.
My heart rate when sleeping is 65bpm, and I can't focus on anuthing if my heart rate is below 90bpm during the day.
Some of the most productive people I know eat nothing but donuts and coffee, and don't exercise at all. They're smart, driven, and highly successful.
Meanwhile, I know a lot of people who put exercise and food as a priority, and don't seem nearly as sharp or as successful. Maybe this all washes out, with age.
Point is - do whatever works for you. Don't let some blog, or some person on the internet, tell you how to perform optimally!
Don't ask me how I know :-)
https://www.labroots.com/trending/cell-and-molecular-biology...
This has so great effect that it's easy to observe even in a simple computer simulations. If you don't adapt and the environment is changing, then you go extinct.
Think about this sharks and how much their environment has changed since they were born. As a spices they will have a very hard time adapting to the changes we induce in the environment. While small animals that have lifespan in weeks, months or few years will be adapting a lot faster. E.g. in one generation of this shark a mouse will go trough up to 900 generations with up to 12 offspring in each generation.
This shark probably will go extinct and mice will thrive.
Interesting consequence of this effect is that our lifespan is most likely not dictated by any fundamental limitations of biological machinery to maintain us healthy indefinitely.
A lot more likely is that we are evolutionary designed to get old and die.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolvability
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_immortality
The longevity of the Greenland shark, humans and other long living animals, is in spite of evolutionary pressure to reproduce, raise the next generation and die.
N.B.: I'm a layman on this topic as well.
A lot of animals just don't need to live longer than 1, 2, or 20 years to reproduce. There is no evolutionary pressure to do so. From our human perceptive life is valuable on its own merit, but nature doesn't see it that way. All it really cares about is replicating those precious DNA molecules, and different species have different strategies for that. For some species, it takes a long time to produce offspring. Whales, for example, live a long time as well. They're huge and it takes a long time for them to become fully grown, find mates, produce offspring, etc. There is a lot of evolutionary pressure to live long. Humans live comparatively long because it takes a long time for individuals to acquire the skills we use as a survival strategy.
Not too much is known about the lives of Greenland sharks, but there are probably some evolutionary pressures for them to live long lives.
Species need to live until reproduce, maybe several times, and see the next generation into being able to live on their own. That is about 35-50 for humans (granted the 15-20/generation - relatively prolonged maturation period given our size - is primarily because of the brain/skills development you mentioned). Additionally, because of the complexity of societal organization, skills and other knowledge, we've got boost from having the grand generation around to help and transfer knowledge and experience. That brought us to 60-70.
One individual out of 28 is known to be 400 years old. There is a subadult population bulge. Any way of estimating natural life spans from this? Could be some very, very old sharks out there. I wonder how big the 400yr old one is, relative to max known size.
If the probability is constant, you can model the lifespan as an exponential decay - there is no real upper limit, but the population of older individuals is very small.
For most animals the probability increases as they age, and becomes very high towards the end of their life, but this is not the case for all animals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negligible_senescence
"(probability) becomes very high towards the end of their life."
This is, ultimately, what we want to know. At what age do they start to die of old age? Oldest living vertebrate is interesting, but I think it's mostly interesting because of what it says about the species?
Is it possible that a large vertebrate doesn't have an old age point, where probability of death is very high?
I was actually curious if anyone could help answer the following:
(a) how one would define inhabitant (including bacteria?) (b) what the net %age change actually would be given a suitable choice of (a)
Humans have displaced over 90% of all terrestrial vertebrate biomass (land animals with a backbone).
http://peakoilbarrel.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Terrestr...
Most of the human + livestock biomass is utterly dependent on Haber-Bosch process derived nitrogen fertiliser, produced via nonrenewable natural gas (methane, a fossil fuel).
The goalposts seem to have shifted from the person I replied to.
If you look at the linked chart, humans have increased net terrestrial biomass, yes, but virtually all of it now exists as just eight species: cattle, pigs, chickens, sheep, horses, goats, cas, and dogs. Variants of the original chart highlight this.
https://www.survival.org.au/images/world-terrestrial-vertebr...
That is:
- Naturally-occurring vertebrate bodymass surviving on sustainable current-process nitrogen fixation has fallen precipitously, by ~99%.
- Net genetic diversity within and among those populations has similarly fallen, possibly below sustainable values for many species. Numerous species have gone extinct, many previously small, some prolific (passenger pigeon).
- A terrestrial vertebrate population of thousands of mammals and tens of thousands of overall species ... is now utterly dominated by about nine species. (The eight livestock/pet classes above, and humans.) A few other human symbiotes (rats, mice, deer) have also likely increased. All are dependent on nonsustainable nitrogen fixation among other nonrenewable or nonsustainable practices and inputs.
- Dense and interlinked populations are breeding grounds for novel trans-species disease, among other hygenic consequences. These affect both humans and livestock. The principle can be extended to plant onocrops as well, from tobacco to trees (in the non /r/trees sense, generally).
I wonder if we will be remembered by future biologists as cyanobacteria are remembered by our biologists today.
It's hard to imagine a piece of the world that we haven't had an impact on.
There are many excellent seafood but this is dog-food grade at best, not decent food for humans unless you haven't anything else. Cooking with urine would be healthier providing the same flavor without the extra-poisons. Pretty disgusting stuff.
Fascinating that the fate of these sharks depended on a completely unrelated technological advance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambergris
Yeah, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_oil#Applications, up until 1972 in USA, apparently.
Trees ~20-40' high (~6-12m) are ~10,000 years old.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24230327
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12270448
After 400 years some kind of rare intelligence must surely develop.