Ok, extremely random and extremely old necro, but:
The incredulity about baitfish size didn’t occur for me, the numbers seems pretty reasonable at first glance
It was quick for me (120 seconds of Google) to find multiple “touches” of information that supports these numbers. Writing this comment took much longer. Info at end of comment.
I guess the purpose of this comment is:
*mumbles some vague justification*⭐minimal trust investigations⭐ *mumbling continues* .
It’s good to check stuff out using Google and can be easy
Also, the program of research seems important, the welfare of farmed fish and aquaculture seems important
This has baitfish at a $1B industry. Given some guesses/intuitions of how revenue breaks down to cost of good sold (maybe $100-200M cost of producing the fish in terms of feed, amortized facilities), and some knowledge of the physical size of the fish, ag/aquaculture industry, 1-10B baitfish is an unfortunately believable estimate.
This study has measured regulation cost into the 8 figures ($12M). It also mentions hectares per farm.
I expect that if we back out the hectares using this paper (assuming it’s there), then multiply the hectares with the density we found in info 3a, we get big numbers (there’s thousands of hectares at least, maybe tens of thousands).
(I actually stopped here and didn’t track down the numbers.)
More points of evidence from the above:
The size and cost of regulation itself. If we have a net profit of 5-20%, that’s 50 to 200M net profit. So the size of regulation checks out to that number (if it’s a much larger fraction of net profit, that’s less believable and if it’s too small, the existence of the paper is less likely).
The fact that there’s a literature on baitfish, the existence of literature itself suggests it’s not a tiny industry.
Ok, extremely random and extremely old necro, but:
The incredulity about baitfish size didn’t occur for me, the numbers seems pretty reasonable at first glance
It was quick for me (120 seconds of Google) to find multiple “touches” of information that supports these numbers. Writing this comment took much longer. Info at end of comment.
I guess the purpose of this comment is:
*mumbles some vague justification* ⭐minimal trust investigations⭐ *mumbling continues* .
It’s good to check stuff out using Google and can be easy
Also, the program of research seems important, the welfare of farmed fish and aquaculture seems important
Info 1:
http://www.ksuaquaculture.org/Species/Baitfish.htm
This has baitfish at a $1B industry. Given some guesses/intuitions of how revenue breaks down to cost of good sold (maybe $100-200M cost of producing the fish in terms of feed, amortized facilities), and some knowledge of the physical size of the fish, ag/aquaculture industry, 1-10B baitfish is an unfortunately believable estimate.
Info 2:
https://www.afs-oc.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/F3905p201-211Drake.pdf
This article reports ~100M baitfish reported for Ontario, which has a population of 15M, or less than 5% that of the US.
Info 3a:
So we see ~250k-500k fish per hectare in the book “The Progressive Fish-culturist”:
Info 3b:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jwas.12416
This study has measured regulation cost into the 8 figures ($12M). It also mentions hectares per farm.
I expect that if we back out the hectares using this paper (assuming it’s there), then multiply the hectares with the density we found in info 3a, we get big numbers (there’s thousands of hectares at least, maybe tens of thousands).
(I actually stopped here and didn’t track down the numbers.)
More points of evidence from the above:
The size and cost of regulation itself. If we have a net profit of 5-20%, that’s 50 to 200M net profit. So the size of regulation checks out to that number (if it’s a much larger fraction of net profit, that’s less believable and if it’s too small, the existence of the paper is less likely).
The fact that there’s a literature on baitfish, the existence of literature itself suggests it’s not a tiny industry.