Comment by ulrikrasmussen
1 day ago
I would agree, but then I read the Wikipedia page which says that around 10 of these animals are caught every day as bycatch, so I assume the shark that was studied came from one of these.
This shark takes 150 years to reach sexual maturity and gestates for 8-18 years. It's pretty fucked up that bycatch at this rate is just accepted because it surely is going to lead the species to extinction. Humans are pretty fucking arrogant.
If these sharks were not caught at this rate then I would agree that they shouldn't be studied in ways that require killing them, but since they are, I think it is better to at least get some knowledge out of it and possibly raise awareness of the problem.
Edit: read the article, and it actually says it was caught by the scientists and not as bycatch. Still, this catch is negligible compared to the 3500 that are caught, killed and thrown out again (I assume) each year
People don't want to face the music but the way we're fishing is completely unsustainable.
The way we live on land is unsustainable too, of course.
There's a massive reduction in the whale song of the blue whales. Almost halved. They are presumably starving.
That something ginormous can be so elegant, beautiful and sleek is hard to conceive till one meets a blue whale. Let's let them thrive on the blue planet.
The Blue Whale population has actually increased since the 70s. When they were critically endangered, their population numbered roughly 1,000-2,000 but population estimates for today put the number at roughly tenfold that. The 1966 worldwide moratorium on whaling has been incredibly successful and we’ve also seen recoveries in Humpback and Grey Whales.
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We keep talking about “sustainability” but sustainability is a secondary issue here.
The primary issue is that we are taking individuals and basically torturing and/or killing them, rarely for good reasons.
It won’t even be decades before our descendants look back at horror for how we treat them, not unlike how we can’t even imagine how our ancestors thought it was ok to have human slaves.
The major difference will be that the horrors of human chattel slavery (even the name clearly links it to how we treat non human animals) have largely only been recorded via text. The horrors of our actions will be available in text, images, videos for all to see in perpetuity by just looking at an Instagram archive.
so we need to extract resources from space asap, now that the planet cant sustain entire human race
Adding more resources doesn't solve the problem that they aren't being managed sustainably. We can't exhaust all the resources in space, but we could definitely exhaust all of the resources accessible to us in space. Like how we can't exhaust all of the oil or all of the gold on this planet, but we could exhaust all of the resource which can be mined economically.
This was once explained to me with a metaphor of a bacteria colony in a jar. The colony doubles every 24 hours. So they quickly exhaust the space in the jar. No problem, you give them another jar. 24 hours later, their population doubles, and they have filled both jars.
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now this guy's just a straight shooter with upper management written all over him.
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No, we need to reduce dramatically our own population.
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jeez 8-18 years, is that a record or is it one of those things they don't know enough about them to narrow down? that's another thing to think about when my ignorant self is eating my sushi. i used to assume that farmed salmon was marginally better than wild, but given how much wild fish gets fed to farmed fish, not sure that is even a plus on top of the ecological effects of fish farming.
> The Greenland sharks used in her co-study were caught between 2020 and 2024 using scientific long lines off the coast of the University of Copenhagen's Arctic Station on Disko Island, Greenland.
But I guess a few sharks for scientific sampling are probably still negligible compared to bycatch.
Tangent, but you might want to watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tuS1LLOcsI
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