There's a whole quantitative science of this in fishery management. It's called "maximum sustainable yield." I wish I could find the quote, but someone very accurately summarized the whole philosophy as "preserving the wreckage."
this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2025
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What are those magestic white jellyfish? They seem to be thriving.
Are they really plastic trash bags? 😭
Aren't We all plastic trash bags in a way.
As one of the great poets of our time put it, «Do you ever feel like a plastic bag drifting through the wind, wanting to start again?»
So, I missed an entire era of pop, then within the past couple of years discovered this song. I like the intro, and would get really into it then hear this and be like .... Um, no? Not really? ..... And it just ruined it right off.
How are you quantifying the amount of each species in the past? Or is this just wish-fulfillment hogwash?
E: Ah yes, the hive-mind defense, downvoting something you have no answer for.
This comment was reported, but I'll leave it in tact because it lends itself to the conversation and you weren't a dick with response afterwards
How are you quantifying the amount of each species in the past? Or is this just wish-fulfillment hogwash?
For example by looking at historical fishing records. One paper that does this back into the 1750s across mulpile regions and species is this one:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmarsys.2008.12.011
It is behind a pay wall, but I'll quote the methods here:
- Materials and method
2.1. The pre-industrialized period When it comes to written testimonies of pre-industrial fishing activity, the time frame is in most cases limited to a few hundred years. The starting point of the industrial period is usually considered to be the second half of the 19th century in the major European and North American fisheries. The industrialization of fisheries is characterized by a number of technological changes in fishing techniques, which all contributed to more efficient fishing operations. In the 1860s machine made cotton nets gradually replaced the old heavier hemp nets, and in the following decades steam propulsion and, from the turn of the 20th century, motor propulsion gave extra trawling power and the ability to move independently of prevailing winds. In principal then, historical evidence can be found as far back in time as fishing has taken place. However, the demands for available, consistent and reliable historical data limit the time frame consider-ably. Another limitation is that the historical datasets need to cover a number of years in order to be suitable for testing for climate signals. Therefore, the following discussion of historical data only includes datasets, which span more than c. 50 years.
2.2. Written documents With regard to written documents the oldest known data for fishing are from Europe. During the course of the 14th–16th centuries writing on paper became increasingly common in Europe. This is also the time when the bureaucracy of the emerging modern state bureaucracy as well as larger private enterprises gradually became established. These developments ensured two aspects of fisheries record keeping. First of all, the fiscal interest of the modern state ensured an interest in accurate numbers. Secondly, state interest often lead to an institutionalization of fisheries regulations, whereby a steady, recurring and often quite uniform annual collection took place. In line with this, ancient record keeping deals exclusively with commercially important species. Cod, herring, anchovy, sardine, salmon, various flatfish and tuna therefore are the most prominent in this type of historical material. Thus, along with a bias towards European and Atlantic fisheries, there is an inherent bias in terms of which species feature in historical material. During the last decade several large scale projects have been under way trying to recover archival material for reconstructing historical fish stocks, and this review stands on the shoulders of these efforts, which are producing online free access databases. The History of Marine Animal Populations project of the Census of Marine Life programme (2000–2010) is an umbrella for the research of c. 100 historians, archaeologists and marine scientists trying to assess what lived in the oceans before modern times (http://www/. hmapcoml.org/). Within the INCOFISH Specific Targeted Research Project of the European Community (2005–2008) the recovery of time series for historical fisheries is a means to shift the baseline of understandings of ecosystem functioning (http://www.hull.ac.uk/ incofish/index.htm). The Sea Around Us Project of the University of British Columbia is mainly concerned with fisheries developments since 1950, but also has strong components stretching back hundreds of years (http://www.seaaroundus.org/).
2.3. Long-term environmental time series Comparing long-term changes in fish populations with environ-mental variability is strongly aided by the existence of equally long time series of environmental variability. Records of temperature, wind, air pressure and similar parameters for environmental variability and changes rarely exist for longer than c. 100–200 years back in time. Assessing historical climate reconstructions would be a topic for a paper in its own right, but it should be mentioned that much effort is currently being put into such reconstructions, and the following portals hold valuable collections of such time series: CLIVAR, Climate variability and Predictability (http://www.clivar/. org/). KNMI, The Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute, among other resources, provides access to the global CLIWOC project trying to reconstruct the global weather from 1750–1850 (http://climexp.knmi/. nl/). The NOAA Satellite and Information Service is hosting a large amount of temperature proxies (http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/ data.html), while datasets from Greenland ice cores are available from the University of Copenhagen, (http://www.glaciology.gfy.ku.dk/). Finally, a large collection of dataset can be extracted from NASA at (http://gcmd.nasa.gov/index.html). A very large project currently in progress is Millenium, which has as its main goal to reconstruct the climate variability in Europe during the last 1000 years to see whether changes in the last one hundred years are unique in scale (http:// geography.swan.ac.uk/millennium/index.htm).
P.s: Is there good way to share the whole pdf?
Assuming you're not just trolling peopke who care about the environment, I have an actual evidence based answer here, current levels of biomass in the ocean aren't really known, and are difficult to estimate[0]. They're very widely regarded as dropping heavily as a result of human interference and climate change.
I think you might be misreading the comic though, which I think is more an explanation a shifting baseline, where the first panel is compared to the second, rather than the first which would be the correct reference point for a natural population[1].
It's almost certainly not meant to be representative of the actual species, aside from anything else the size ratio between say, pufferfish, turtles and whales are obviously wrong, but again, I don't think the comic is trying to pretend it's accurate in that respect.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867419312747#bib8
Calling it "wish-fulfilment" doesn't help and makes it sound like you're not actually asking for an answer.
Who exactly was wishing for such a sad scenario to be true?
The image is, if you read left to right and top to bottom, moving backwards in time.
I'm not asking why things got to the point they are at today. I'm asking how someone can just populate an image about the ocean hundreds of years ago off of pure vibes.
There is no science behind just adding more animals to increase the fauna/flora density by entirely subjective amounts here. And I can say that it isn't just meant to show an increase because specific years are used, as well as 3 data ponts, so the density of animals in question is the point.
The wish-fulfillment, because we're moving back in time, is that the ocean was that full of life all those years ago. Unless backed by evidence. Which no one has presented so far.
pure vibes
So you feel good about downvoting someone for rightfully pointing out a lack of evidence, then sending a link to an entire book review which might or might not even show evidence of the thing I was asking for?
LMFAO.
Dude, you said show "proof" and he showed proof. Dunno what you are complaining about. How was he supposed to prove anything without linking to an external source?
I didnt downvote you. I'm not going to do research for you. Linking a book review should be enough to prove it wasn't pulled out of this air.
Burden of proof is on the person who posted, so certainly not you. But they're quiet and you're out here telling me to research why the meme is correct.
That amounts to saying you don't know how to prove it, and believe it on pure subjective opinion. Which makes whatever you link idiotic since it might not even prove what you're trying to say.
The review goes over some of the methodology.
and believe it on pure subjective opinion.
I'm not saying that.
Edit: if you're saying it's based on nothing then I expect you to have looked into it, yes
Why should I, as the person receiving a meme, research why it is based on fact and not fiction?
That's not how the burden of proof works.
Do memes need burden of proof?
Any media with years, density, "shifting baseline syndrome" is not a meme, it's an infograph disguised as a meme.
So yes, your "meme" requires proof. And you're a propagandist idiot if you think otherwise.
There is no secret agenda here. Its just a dumb meme. You can a meme with the words "shifting baseline syndrome" if you want. In fact you can put whatever you want in a meme.
Because you asked for it? Someone posted a dumb meme and didn't cite it with studies and now you are mad. You do have some burden since you are the one who started the discussion on proof in the first place. If you can't even be bothered to look at the proof they bring, its not their problem.
Do you have evidence that oceans were less plentiful in the past? Or are you just taking a contrarian position because it's easy?
Again, I'm NOT the one that needs to provide evidence, because I have made no claims.
The ORIGINAL POSTER needs to provide proof because their "meme" is an infograph with a claim.
You're twisting the burden of proof, so go f yourself for your bad faith.
if you can dismiss the proofless infograph without proof, I can dismiss your dismissal without proof. We can go on recursively all day.
Not now that works. They made a claim without backing. They now need to prove it.
I don't need to prove my claim because I have no claim. My only request was a demand for proof for the original comic.
Look, if this were a publication in a scientific journal, sure.
But it's not. It's a webforum. In casual conversation, you can gesture to the idea that there was more sealife before mechanization, pollution, and industrial fishing becacasue... yeah. Duh. Of course there was.
Your whole attitude has been bad faith from the beginning. I think your curiosity would have gone over a lot better had you stopped before saying "Or is this just wish-fulfillment hogwash?"
I don't see why you had to start off so combative.