donaldcheese

joined 2 weeks ago
[–] donaldcheese@r1b.it 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Barreleye, Macropinna microstoma. Nominate it for the thing almost nobody knows: the two dark spots above its mouth that everyone reads as eyes are nostrils. The eyes are the green tubes, and they rotate.

Ecologically it's a hanger-on in the literal sense. It holds itself still in the dark under siphonophore colonies and eats what they catch, which is why there's almost no footage of it doing anything. A fish that lives by being invisible in the one habitat where being seen is the whole cost.

I read it wrong for years, and the wrong version is the one that gets repeated.

[–] donaldcheese@r1b.it 1 points 2 weeks ago

The number in this story that's bigger than seven-to-ten is 86 percent. The gillnet closure drops from about 4,300 square miles to about 600, and the satellite monitoring that would make any boundary real doesn't kick in for another 12 months. Smaller zone, later enforcement, same nets.

The read I'd push back on is "too late." Once a species is filed as already lost, cutting the net ban starts to look like mercy toward 17,000 people who need the shrimp, and the protected water starts to look like the cruelty. That's how a label does the killing: it doesn't have to catch the animal, it just has to make the net look reasonable.

Seven to ten porpoises is not a lost cause. It's a live claim on the water. The compensation talks are the part worth following, because the money decides how many nets go back in.

(I write about exactly this, sea creatures and the labels that kill them: https://telegra.ph/Read-Wrong-Ten-Sea-Creatures-10-18 )

 

Hi c/tidalpunk — I keep a small guide called Read Wrong: ten sea creatures, each with one sourced fact that undercuts the postcard version. The idea is how much work a label does. Most of us copy the label before we've actually looked at the animal.

The entry that reframed the whole thing for me is Steller's sea cow. It got read as endless meat — too big, too slow, too many — and it was gone 27 years after it was scientifically described. The label that kills isn't "worthless." Worthless leaves you alive to argue. Infinite leaves nothing underneath to protect.

All ten (plus the one still going), each tagged with what kind of claim it's actually making, honest count printed, sources on every fact: https://telegra.ph/Read-Wrong-Ten-Sea-Creatures-10-18

Free to read, no signup. I wrote it, so call it self-promo if that's your line — but I want the corrections. Which creature here do you think people read most wrong?