I’m extremely unsure of how I should think about whether shrimp are sentient (or what matters to them, or whether farming them is bad for them) or similar questions, but numbers like these seem like a flashing warning sign spelling out something like “there might be a moral catastrophe over here, we can’t afford to casually dismiss this.”
I also find myself unable to really comprehend numbers or statements like “230 billion (90% SCI: 150 billion − 370 billion) shrimp are alive on farms at any moment, which surpasses any farmed animal estimate known to date, including farmed insect numbers.”
And as always, I really appreciated the diagrams:
Numbers of farmed shrimp and other farmed animals alive at any time
Fig. 2. Estimated numbers (means) of different farmed animals alive at any time. The figure for farmed shrimp is presented in darker blue.
If you could pick research directions, do you have an idea for what might be most pressing to study?
I’m curating this post.
I’m extremely unsure of how I should think about whether shrimp are sentient (or what matters to them, or whether farming them is bad for them) or similar questions, but numbers like these seem like a flashing warning sign spelling out something like “there might be a moral catastrophe over here, we can’t afford to casually dismiss this.”
I also find myself unable to really comprehend numbers or statements like “230 billion (90% SCI: 150 billion − 370 billion) shrimp are alive on farms at any moment, which surpasses any farmed animal estimate known to date, including farmed insect numbers.”
And as always, I really appreciated the diagrams:
If you could pick research directions, do you have an idea for what might be most pressing to study?