As Fish Stocks Collapse, Overpopulated Lobsters Resort to Cannibalism 231
The Maine lobster population is booming, but it turns out that's bad news if you're a little lobster: "'We've got the lobsters feeding back on themselves just because they're so abundant,' said Richard Wahle, a marine sciences professor at the University of Maine, who is supervising the research. 'It's never been observed just out in the open like this,' he said."
Abundance caused by populations of their predators collapsing.
Soylent Red (Score:5, Funny)
Soylent Red is lobsters!!!!
Re:Soylent Red (Score:4, Funny)
I thought it was crab people.
Re:Soylent Red (Score:5, Funny)
You're laughing, but I'm sure that crabs have their own opinion of us. I can vividly imagine the dialogue...
- Why are you scratching your cloaca?
- I think I got humans.
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I never laugh.
First lobster cannibal's thoughts (Score:5, Funny)
"No wonder those humans are always trying to eat us...we're delicious!"
Re:First lobster cannibal's thoughts (Score:5, Informative)
Interesting fact about lobsters, they haven't always been considered delicious. In colonial times, lobsters were considered "poverty food." They were harvested from tidal pools and served to children, to prisoners, and to indentured servants. In Massachusetts, some of the servants rebelled and demanded that they would not be forced to eat lobster more than three times a week.
In fact I met a old woman who told me that, when she was young, she would hide and eat her school lunch- her family was too poor to afford anything other than lobster and the other kids would tease her.
I just goes to show you how society, culture and advertising controls our behaviour, beliefs and taste buds.
As far as this lobster "overpopulated" lobster nonsense- call me when you can walk along the shore at low tide and just pick them up by the dozens (as was common in years past). That would be the natural equilibrium population before we started commercially harvesting.
This whole "overpopulated" is clearly perpetuated by someone who wants increased quotas.
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True story from when I started at Google, back in the good days years ago. It was on the last company wide ski trip, talking to an other employee.
- So where is you office on the campus, what is your closest cafe?
- It is Cafe Foo. (not real name)
- Oh I like cafe Foo, good food.
- NO! IT SUCKS! IT'S LOBSTER ALL THE TIME!!!
She was dead serious. Nobody's complaining about too much lobster or kobe beef these days.
I guess the food supply (Score:5, Funny)
...is getting pinched.
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No no no. Here's the proper way to do it:
I guess the food supply...
*put on sunglasses* ... is getting pinched.
YEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAHHH!!!
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No no no. Here's the proper way to do it:
I guess the food supply...
*put on sunglasses* ... is getting pinched.
http://instantrimshot.com/index.php?sound=csi [instantrimshot.com]
is even better.
So i guess RedLobster is going to have a massive sale now??
Re:I guess the food supply (Score:5, Funny)
Hint:: There's a reason for it...
Re:I guess the food supply (Score:5, Funny)
Of course, (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to order lobster in a restaurant they will still charge "Market Price."
Re:Of course, (Score:5, Funny)
Lobster Fed Lobster requires a premium price.
I'm super rich, so I only eat Lobster Lobster and Kobe Kobe (kobe beef fed with kobe beef). I look forward to the availability of kobe lobster lobster (lobsters only fed lobsters fed with kobe beef).
Re:Of course, (Score:4, Insightful)
You can have your Lobster Lobster, but you can't have Kobe Kobe. Kobe beef refers to more than just a specific breed of cattle. It refers to how they're fed, too.
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and here I though it meant Kobe Bryant. The jokes not as fun now :-(
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Don't you tell me what I can't have! Do you know who I am? I'll have you fired you insolent little puke! Now get your ass in the kitchen, and get me some fucking Kobe Kobe!
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Relevant:
F: "You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs"
L: "I hardly think they'd use broken eggs in executive room service, Gordon."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKcNB3hKG7Y [youtube.com]
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You can have your Lobster Lobster, but you can't have Kobe Kobe. Kobe beef refers to more than just a specific breed of cattle. It refers to how they're fed, too.
You overlooked the option of cultivating grain and grass with kobe grade beef as fertilizer...
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Yeah, I mean it takes a lot of facelifts to get the nuts up to chest level to begin with, and harvesting them can be a painful process.
They make for excellent pork however.
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Man...its tough to lose weight living in LA.
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Re:Of course, (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a good, free market, reason for this. If you live outside Maine, the cost of shipping live lobsters is mostly keeping them alive (water is heavy, temperatures need to be maintained, etc.). If you live in Maine, then the restaurants aren't limited by the price of their food, but by their seating/serving capacity. They can charge their normal price, and still fill all their seats, so why lower the price?
Re:Of course, (Score:5, Informative)
There actually is pretty cheap lobster in Maine in the right season. Absurdly cheap, really.
Re:Of course, (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, it is. my mom, when were were young, and on food stamps, used to buy lobster on sale - and people would stare. But a 1 1/4 lb lobster actually goes a long way, better than steak. You get enough to keep 2 pre-teen kids happy, pick the carcass for all the leftover meat and get a nice stew for another meal minimum. We were 5 kids, so 4 lobsters would feed us for 3 dinners, about $12-15 on sale. Not that we complained much...
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newsflash: product is cheaper where it is locally available
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I live in Las Vegas and they have seemingly limitless supplies of Alaska king crab at the buffet for a reasonable price. How come, given this alleged overabundance of Maine lobster, it's not the same for lobster?? I want my $15 all-you-can-eat lobster buffet!!
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Those attached to hotels I'm sure are subsidized by casino revenue, same as the cheap (compared to elsewhere) hotels themselves.
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Crab is caught, frozen, and processed all in Alaska (often all on boats!), so shipping it isn't a problem. Come one, don't you watch Deadliest Catch?
Also, if you have ever eaten way more lobster than you really should have, you will quickly realize all-you-can-eat lobster is a one-time-thing ;)
Re:Of course, (Score:4, Informative)
In one of Peter Lynch's books he noted that the pilgrims had a clause in their contracts that they could not be fed lobster more than 3 times a week.
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Why not cook and freeze them at the port?
The same way they do with shrimp.
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Frozen lobster sucks. Period. Good only for stew and, well,, stew.
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Lobster is bad enough, but frozen lobster? That sounds... like it brings disgusting to a whole new level.
Re:Of course, (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, most lobster is shipped packed with dry ice, watere is not necessary, and weight is not the issue. It;s nearly impossible to keep lobsters alive in shipping for more than 24 hours (read that as, 25+ hours), so they go by air if the truck can;t get there in time. And nothing quite matches the odor of dead lobster, even packed. Most airlines I know that take them do so with the caveat that if they are not picked up nearly immediately, they go in the trash.
Nothing flies cheap any more.
Re:Of course, (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to order lobster in a restaurant they will still charge "Market Price."
Yes. Market price is what you, or the diner seated at the next table, are willing to pay. This price has nothing to do with their cost of procurement.
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True in practice, though it's a bit misleading as a practice. The terminology dates to fish taverns that had fixed prices for items with relatively stable prices, but varying "market price" for items where the wholesale cost to them varied significantly, resulting in them updating their retail price on a daily basis accordingly. Of course, that's not how big fish restaurants actually set prices, but they like to maintain the fiction.
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True in practice, though it's a bit misleading as a practice. The terminology dates to fish taverns that had fixed prices for items with relatively stable prices, but varying "market price" for items where the wholesale cost to them varied significantly, resulting in them updating their retail price on a daily basis accordingly.
The definition of "market price" is impacted very little by cute stories that may or may not have any actual basis in history and not at all by what you want it to mean.
market price
Noun
The price of a commodity when sold in a given market.
It doesn't matter what it costs the seller to produce the good. Market price is what it can be sold for. If the seller's cost is higher than market price the seller has a problem. If the seller's cost is lower than market price, they have the potential to profit
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The latter: it's intended (imo) to evoke a perception that the price depends on what deals the chef got at the fish market this morning, which is typically not the case.
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He's stating the first part, and implying the second.
How did you not understand that?
Re:Of course, (Score:5, Funny)
Sarcasm and inference are both broken on the Internet. Please fix that.
BTW, I know it can't be fixed and has nothing to do with the Internet. BTW stands for "By the way". Yes, I know that re-stating a common abbreviation is irritating. My sig is a joke. Yes I know the joke isn't funny if I say it's a joke. Yes I know this disclaimer is too long to read. This disclaimer is an object lesson in what I think ought to be one of "the laws" for the Internet, right up there with Godwin. It goes something like this: "if there's something ridiculous to be inferred from what you've typed in a forum, it will be inferred" with a corrolary, "no amount of explanation can prevent such inferences". Furthermore, I did not copy this from Chuck Lorre. Yes I know I'm not as good as Chuck Lorre. Neither are you. Yes I know that you can't Godwin something explicitly, and so on and so forth, ad nauseum until we all explode. No I don't have schizophrenia or live in my parent's basement. You do. Yes I know that's childish. Yes, any attempt to disclaim only leads to more misunderstandings. Thus, one can only conclude that this is a strange game in which the only winning move is not to play. That's a War Games reference. Yes I know you knew that. Yes I know you didn't know that. Yes I'll Google War Games for you. No I won't...
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What The Market Will Bear - the real version of Supply and Demand!
This shouldn't be on Idle (Score:5, Insightful)
It's no joke, and it's happening all over the world, the scenario is converging for a catastrophic decline in fish populations.
Re:This shouldn't be on Idle (Score:4, Interesting)
Mad lobster disease, anyone?
Exactly (Score:3, Insightful)
We go to the market and see the fish case always stocked. But the thing to realize, that as species are being fished out, they fill the case with other species. And prices on some species are skyrocketing.
Farming isn't very viable in many cases because they feed the farmed fish wild caught fish and the cages pollute the ecosystem so badly that the wild fish start to die out. Trout and Talpia are the only ones IIRC that are farmed sustainably - definitely not salmon.
And the thing that kills me, the next tim
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This will fix by itself, no food for humans, humans will resort to cannibalism. Sometimes I think we deserve to disappear from this planet
Re:Exactly (Score:4, Interesting)
And we will.
I remember reading about a TV show with Dean Stockwell that predicted 911 and was predicting a massive reduction in world population.
Now I know how it will happen:
http://www.businessinsider.com/peak-phosphorus-and-food-production-2012-12 [businessinsider.com]
This, add Monsanto and laws against keeping seeds and voila: Starvation.
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Re:Exactly (Score:4, Insightful)
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Farming isn't very viable in many cases because they feed the farmed fish wild caught fish and the cages pollute the ecosystem so badly that the wild fish start to die out.
That gets fixed by switching to the many cases that are viable.
Trout and Talpia are the only ones IIRC that are farmed sustainably - definitely not salmon.
Wikipedia disagrees [wikipedia.org]. They claim salmon and carp are the most farmed fish in the world.
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Salmon farming is playing helll with wild populations, but other than that it's very sustainable. Just ask the seals.
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Just because they're the most farmed fish in the world doesn't mean they are sustainable. Passenger pigeons, at one point, were the most-harvested bird species in the US... turns out that wasn't sustainable. One difference between passenger pigeons and salmon is what the diminishing resource is... in the case of the pigeons, it was the pigeons themselves that were hunted to extinction. For salmon, the resource is ocean/shore localities suit
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Just because they're the most farmed fish in the world doesn't mean they are sustainable. Passenger pigeons, at one point, were the most-harvested bird species in the US... turns out that wasn't sustainable.
Farmed != harvested. It's pretty deceptive to equate the two. For example, if passenger pigeons had been farmed instead of just harvested in the wild, they would still be with us today.
A second bit of deception comes from the term, "sustainable". Sustainability is not a bit you set, but a matter of degree. Merely farming a fish that was previously harvested in the wild is a huge improvement in sustainability. Also virtually everything is sustainable in small amounts, be it fish farming or nuclear meltdow
Re:This shouldn't be on Idle (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, come on, think of the bright side - This means great news for swarms of inedible poisonous jellyfish that can now thrive in the absence of their natural predators!
You didn't like swimming, did you?
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Or so say the econazis and global warming hoaxists. Meanwhile there isn't a single shred of evidence backing any of these claims up. You leftists will say anything to impose new regulations and taxes on the free market though won't you?
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While you are correct it seems no one is willing to do what we need too to stop it.
Ban fishing of some species in some areas and use the navy/coast guard to enforce that.
Fishermen will have to be bought out by government or forced out of business another way.
Re:This shouldn't be on Idle (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, it is being done, and is being enforced [noaa.gov].
Problem is, often the cost of fines and such are lower than the potential profits.
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Overfishing? (Score:2)
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Or under-lobstering!
Next in the news: (Score:4, Interesting)
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So then... (Score:2)
Why is Lobster still so expensive?
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Why is Lobster still so expensive?
I live in Seattle and fish here is expensive. but then again, chicken and beef is too expensive also.
Go figure.
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Something tells me the leasing office would look down on my installing a chicken coop in my apartment.
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For fresh lobster outside of Maine, mostly shipping costs. The actual wholesale price, bought in Maine, was really cheap [wsj.com] this year due to the glut.
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So why aren't they sold cheap frozen in a bag like shrimp?
Re:So then... (Score:4, Informative)
Lobster doesn't freeze well.
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Why is Lobster still so expensive?
I've personally seen lobster for sale in Maine for as little as $2.80/lbs. That's cheaper than hotdogs.
Re:So then... (Score:4, Interesting)
Why is Lobster still so expensive?
Originally, lobster was originally poor-people's food. In the USA New-England area in both pre-colonial times, they were so plentiful that native americans and early colonists could simply catch them from tidal pools along the shoreline. This made lobsters cheap food to serve toe prisoners and indentured servant (those that bartered for passage to the "new-world" with labor contracts). With the Cod populations crashing, it sounds like we are going back to those times...
The reason lobster got expensive was that transportation costs used to be a large part of the price. Also over time, with most profitible businesses, often the infrastructure determines the price more than the supply. People that own parts of the infrastructure (fishing territories, relay-holding ponds, lobster gangs [google.com], etc) demand a price level to keep their profit margin the same even when the underlying commodity supply goes up which would nominally send the price down.
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They arent tasty, and they arent exactly protein of high quality, besides the cholesterol problems. And they are darn ugly too. Besides I remember when I was in Angola that they were cheap than most food in upmarket restaurants, and even so. When eating lobster, what counts more is the preparation than the quality of the ingredient actually. Medium/Tiger prawn are so much more tastier than lobster.
"Aren't tasty"? Really? I usually eat them straight out of the shell (preparation: steamed, rarely boiled). No extra fatty butter or other sauce. Mind you, I don't over-salt or over-flavour my regular food either, maybe that's why you don't get any taste out of them? I don't recall un-sauced shrimp (prawn) being any tastier, just a different taste and texture.
Re:So then... (Score:5, Informative)
Aren't tasty? what? Lobster is the ultimate white meat.
preparation? A live lobster and a pot of boiling water. This is not hard, people. If you can;t tell if your lobster is alive, it probably isn't, and never cook dead (or dying) lobster.
Quick primer. Boil until the shell is bright red, plunging the lobster in headfirst. It never realized it was dead.
Serve with baked potato, corn on the cob or greeen geans, plenty of melted butter available. Crack the claws off and open, pull out the meat, drop it in the butter. inCrack off the tail, tear off the tail fins and suck on them like candy :). take a cunck of claw meat and eat that, making room for the tail in the butter. If you're lazy, this is it. Otherwise, the knuckles above the claw have meat, each leg has a thread of meat, those tail fins usually do also. there is meat all through the body (carapace), and a little work nearly doubles your haul. Or give it to someone who knows how to get in there. Avoid the tomalley if you don't know what it is.
How to tell if yo got a Maine lobster? Measure the carapace, which had better measure between 3 1/2 and 5 inches from the end of the carapace to the edge of the eye socket. Cheating is very rare in Maine waters, lobstermen will send each other to jail over this... If it is shorter, good chance it came from Canada, or possibly Massachussetts. Those big spots the tail when raw/live? That is not a Maine lobster, probably a Longostino, which is not a lobster. Most are actually shrimp.
Sorry, I love lobster, and miss it so.
Don't tell my wife (Score:2)
If she finds out about this she will demand that we dine out at the local lobster restaurant until the fish/lobster balance is restored.
but wtf are they doing for garlic butter? (Score:2)
no wonder it's called "wild" lobster. the boors.
Wow! Just like hedge fund managers... (Score:2)
No wait. Hedge fund managers would eat their own young. Without salt.
Worried! (Score:3)
I hope this leaves enough cave lobster for my Dwarves!
Circle of life (Score:2)
Why is this bad? It sounds to me like the population will control itself and there is built in limitations to the growth rate...who gives a shit what a little lobster does? They don't feel anything anyways!
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Of course lobsters feel. As do humans, who happen to have been doing the exact same thing to each other for a long, long time.
mmmmmm (Score:2)
I think we're approaching... (Score:3, Funny)
I think we're approaching a fishcal cliff...
Welcome to the final act of humanity on Earth (Score:2)
You've got to respect... (Score:5, Funny)
Whoever first ate lobster.
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But not as much as the guy who was hungry enough to first eat an oyster.
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Never been observed? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe you're too young to remember, or you can't find it easily on the Internets, but back in the 60s when I was a kid, my family used to own French House Island off Jonesport in Maine, and we'd be up there every summer.
It had been observed then.
Now, that said, there's nothing better than Maine Lobster. We used to make blueberry pancakes from the blueberries on the island, and eat fresh lobster in butter, as well as clams we dug up and mussels.
But just because you can't find it observed this century doesn't mean it's "never been observed".
They're just feeling crabby. (Score:3)
Wouldn't you?
They are not "resorting" to anything. (Score:5, Informative)
Lobsters do this anyway.
Source: my degree in Marine Biology.
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What, proof by authority? Well, I sneer at that, and will do my own... wait, you're right.
I blame (Score:5, Funny)
all the vegetarians out there... They should eat more meat.
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He wants to study cannibalism, huh? Just wait until PETA reads that juicy little line! They'll eat him alive.
Human Flesh, the only meat PETA will eat.
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There are no sea kittens involved, so that's OK with PETA.
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Considering the primitive brain those bugs have, I fail to see why anyone would be surprised at their cannibalism, the rule of thumb in the ocean is anything you can eat, you do eat. 90% of my goldfish and koi fry are lost to cannibalism and predation.
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FYI health wise, eating marine meat (fish & shell fish) is completely different then eating red meat.
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Remove the ability for corporations to donate to political campaigns/politicians at all, this problem goes away.
Limit personal contributions also, so the "heads" of these corporations cant just continue to buy elections.
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Remove the ability for corporations to donate to political campaigns/politicians at all, this problem goes away. Limit personal contributions also, so the "heads" of these corporations cant just continue to buy elections.
Even better would be removing the ability of politicians to donate tax money to corporations. Also reduce the amount of government interference in the free market and you'll remove the reasons that corporations donate to political campaigns/politicians.
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Quantity available is only one factor in price. Cost to acquire, transport, store, and market also add in. Live lobsters are expensive to transport and store, and lobster meet turns to mush if frozen.
There's an old anecdote that's appropriate here. If there were a huge pile of gold bars on the moon, it wouldn't be economical to go get them.
(seafood is typically cheap on the coasts, where beef is ex
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Because they're actually still kind of hard to catch? It's either baited cages or scuba divers with a bag. Either one is much more time intensive than dropping a huge net behind a ship then hauling it back in.
Re:I'll eat the lobsters! (Score:4, Funny)
Maine.