...make that baselines. Check out these stories from the last week alone.
A perennial favorite: high hopes for hagfish
Fishermen on Canada's East Coast are now considering harvesting hagfish and sea cucumber. Once the center of the cod industry, East Coast fishermen have already turned to sea urchin, toad crab and rock crab in the wake of overfishing and the cod's collapse. Now they have high hopes for hagfish. The best line in the article comes from Scott Grant, a fisheries biologist in St. John's with the Marine Institute at Memorial University who has helped develop the new harvests. He used to warn the fishermen:
"Don't go squashing animals you're not sure of, because in the future they could be of value to you."
Be sure to also check out the part of the article on renaming whore's eggs...
Ocean vacuums
Anything that involves a giant underwater vacuum cleaner called the "Super Sucker" is worth a read, like this article from Ken Weiss. First, experimental algae farms smothered Hawaiian reefs. Which gave a lot of researchers jobs, including inventing the "Super Sucker," which can scoop up 800 lbs. of algae per hour. But the Super Sucker is just a bandaid on a bigger problem--the disappearance of algae-eating sea urchins.
...the populations of urchins around Hawaii have plunged because of excessive harvesting. They are collected for their gonads, prized by sushi-bar patrons.
And another point of interest:
Smith, the university's botanist, calls it "one of life's rich ironies" that she has spent so much of her career trying to protect corals from something unleashed by her former professor, the late Maxwell Doty. Smith was hired in 1988 to take his job as the university's algae specialist.
"At a demonstration of the Super Sucker boat in Kaneohe Bay, diver Eric Conklin, with a hose, prepared to vacuum algae from the coral beds. "
Selling escapees
Finally, according to Seafood.com News (Jan. 4), fishermen in Tasmania are demanding the right to profit from Atlantic salmon that escape from the state's salmon farms. Currently it's illegal, but here at Shifting Baselines we anticipate that will change and Tasmanians will soon be dining on farmed fish gone wild.
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Wouldn't it be sound to allow the fishermen to take the fish? Farm bred salmon may well carry traits (or even diseases?) which could pollute wild populations; and farm bred fish wouldn't seem to be conditioned to survive in the wild. Passing on adaptations (engineered by man) by mating with wild salmon seems kind of an iffy proposition, so it seems to me the escapees should be fair game. Literally.
The article is not at all clear on the reasoning behind the law, but I imagine it has something to do with incentives. If you're allowed to catch salmon escapees, how strong is the incentive to prevent the escape? On the other hand, I agree with you that it's better than the alternative of them being out there in the wild and breeding with wild populations (in so many instances, they already are, though, which is another shifting baseline). The lesser of two evils...but still evil.
Ah, Whore's Eggs. I remember them being called that when I was spending summers "Around the bay" in Newfoundland.
I used to work as a tour guide at the Ocean Sciences Center at Memorial University in Newfoundland, and when we'd show the 'touch tank' animals to fishermen, they'd invariably ask "What good are they?". And talk about shifting baselines? My grandmother (Who passed away just recently at 97) would NOT eat Lobster because when she grew up, only poor people ate it. It was an embarrassment to be seen catching it back then.
Wow, that whole vacuum idea really sucks. I mean, the reason for needing it. And I mean the vacuum. It sucks.