> "Using two pounds of bait to catch one pound of lobster just didn’t make any sense."
Apparently it made sense to the lobster fishermen. If the price of bait went up enough, then it wouldn't anymore. Or if using mackerel and herring as bait became illegal, it definitely wouldn't make sense.
Externalities are the thing that get you, and I think are what the article is obliquely getting at with that phrasing (and the "amid concern about the state of fish stocks" later).
Each poacher who kills an african elephant for the ivory is paid handsomely, and individually it perhaps makes sense to them, but it's illegal because the externality is that the african elephant would go extinct if we treated this purely as a market where "if someone will pay for ivory, that justifies it".
The health of the planet is usually not able to be factored into market economics.
Laws intervene, but ideally we would recognize the externalities and adjust our behavior _before_ laws come into play. We shouldn't have to wait on the law to limit carbon emissions to recognize that destroying the planet, even if it gives us more dollars in our lifetime, is a move that does not make sense for humanity as a whole.
I think the framing of the article is that this inefficient use of resources makes less sense from an externalities perspective, and you're saying that it makes perfect sense from an economic perspective.
Note that I did not say it was all a matter of economics. I'd love to see the ivory trade and rhino horn trade stamped out.
I explicitly said regulations might be appropriate, and since fishing is already heavily regulated, it needn't require a revolution in consciousness to extend it to baitfish.
What are the externalities in this lobster example? It looks less like externalities to me, and more that people would rather pay $X for a pound of lobster than <$X for 2 pounds of lobster bait.
This is unlike the ivory example, where the externality is an entire species going extinct.
Because [1] says that mackerel are of "least concern."
> Despite its highly commercial status, the Atlantic mackerel is listed as Least Concern by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and global catch has remained sustainable.
Now, for herring: [2]'s most recent date was 2010. However, Google says:
"Is herring being overfished?
Image result for are herring going extinct
Population Status. According to the 2022 stock assessment, Atlantic herring is overfished, but not subject to overfishing. Summary stock assessment information can be found on Stock SMART. Herring populations are naturally highly variable."
[3] says "U.S. wild-caught Atlantic herring is a smart seafood choice because it is sustainably managed and responsibly harvested under U.S. regulations."
As a matter of fact, yes. Did you read the comment this was a response to?
But OK, I went back and reread it. I found one unsupported statement:
"But Atlantic mackerel and some populations of Atlantic herring have dropped to a fraction of their former levels. Many stocks are now in the critical zone—meaning that serious harm is likely occurring to the stock—and in some cases, have been that way for decades."
And yet, I cited some authoritative data from agencies that are in a position to know. Those agencies say the species are not endangered.
In some sense, this is no different than that a huge portion of agriculture goes to feed farm animals. It does not make sense from a purely economic nutrition delivery perspective but since people have a preference for meat, especially lobster, people are willing to bear the cost.
Eating meat and other products from higher up the food chain makes perfect nutritional sense. Much more than optimizing for calories per buck which leads to a diet full of HFCS horrors.
Nutrition isn't the same as calories; you can have a more efficient diet in terms of recommended daily values of macro and micro nutrients without having to rely on "products" higher up the food chain.
In terms of sustainably feeding ~8 billion people in a finite world - "spending" 2 pounds of seafood (bait), plus all the overhead of fishermen / boats / fuel / etc., to get 1 pound of seafood (lobster) - that is far, far beyond mere batsh*t crazy.
On the other hand, humanity is spending several pounds of food per day on a generic programmer and all they have to show for it is some numbers shuffling around inside of a computer.
Turning less tasty food into tastier food at a 2:1 ratio honestly does not seem all that terrible in the big picture.
It is now, but lobster used to be considered trash food only worth feeding to prisoners. When they die, all the stuff in their digestive tract almost immediately starts spoiling the meat so it wasn’t until canning in the mid 19th century did it become more common, as they could be cooked and canned right as they were caught. Eventually there was enough demand to support specialized boats that could keep them alive long enough to deliver to a supermarket or restaurant lobster tank and that’s when it became a delicacy.
They’re expensive largely because of the infrastructure required to keep them from going bad.
That bait (herring) is food to a whole lot of people. It has been overfished to support lobster farming, it was taken at cost from the commons to develop a food that few can consume.
It also double dips on the pain inflicted, but pushing the market price for that Bair fish higher than it would be if not for the market pressure imposed by this alternative bait use case.
Interesting, according to this In Canada’s Atlantic provinces, fisheries for lobster and snow crab are booming; in 2022, lobster prices reached record highs, and fisheries managers increased the quota for snow crab in some places by 32 percent.
> It’s estimated that fish caught specifically for bait in Atlantic Canada and New England in the United States amounts to hundreds of millions of kilograms, but the catch is poorly tracked.
hundreds of millions of kilograms. mind boggling. What a waste of life and food.
It's even worse if you read about the overall effectiveness of lobster traps...
...I thought this was better-studied, but I can only find the one article sourced via wikipedia, so perhaps this isn't as certain as I've made it out to be, but traditional lobster traps are apparently so ineffective that the majority of lobsters that interact with them (to get at the bait!) handily escape. [0] From the lobster's perspective, maybe it's not a waste -- lobsters are fed by those kindly humans and their strange wooden boxes, and the slowest among them are eventually lifted into the heavens to an unknown fate.
> As much as mackerel, herring, and other forage fishes underpin fishing in the northwest Atlantic, they serve an equally important role in marine ecosystems. Forage fish are part of the base of the ocean’s energy pyramid, consuming tiny creatures like copepods and, in turn, being consumed by humpback whales, puffins, and a whole host of other species.
> Bait use has altered that food chain, with mackerel and herring turning lobsters, which would normally eat sea urchins and other bottom-dwellers, into fish eaters. Scientists have even hypothesized that because wily lobsters are so good at snagging a meal out of traps without being caught, the intensive use of bait can result in a larger lobster population than would exist otherwise. Yet until very recently, Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) did not track the volume of bait being caught. Many lobster and crab fishers have licenses to catch their own mackerel and herring, and the magnitude of that catch was not quantified. Much of the commercial catch for these species, which is measured, also goes to bait.
The only thing that's wasted is the resources and effort humans spend in the process of doing the catching, the rest is the circle... the circle of life.
There’s a TikTok account that shows up in my feed from a lobster fisherman with a series called “Will It Fish?” where he tests Baird suggested by his audience. I find it quite enjoyable.
Apparently it made sense to the lobster fishermen. If the price of bait went up enough, then it wouldn't anymore. Or if using mackerel and herring as bait became illegal, it definitely wouldn't make sense.