The ideal would be to use something like Welfare Footprint Project’s framework, and actually estimate the time spent suffering or enjoying at various intensities for the average animal over their entire life, weighing and adding it all up. The framework was originally designed to consider only pain/suffering, but it can be adapted to include positive welfare, too, and there’s been some work on that recently here by WFP and here by Ren Ryba of Animal Ask.
There’s some discussion of an example of Atlantic cod by Horta, 2010, revisited by Browning & Veit, 2023 (talk). The example is excerpted from the talk and discussed here on the EA Forum.
FWIW, fertility and mortality rates in crustaceans and fish are often (almost always?) extremely high compared to mammals, and the vast majority die very young. I pulled out some statistics here (footnote 8). Some more in the tables of Butler et al., 1993 and Table 11.1fromBauer, 2023. Kawaguhi (2016) reports estimates from other studies of 7,200, 7,500 and 12,343 eggs produced per female Antarctic krill on average per year (I don’t know what share are actually fertilized and born).
The ideal would be to use something like Welfare Footprint Project’s framework, and actually estimate the time spent suffering or enjoying at various intensities for the average animal over their entire life, weighing and adding it all up. The framework was originally designed to consider only pain/suffering, but it can be adapted to include positive welfare, too, and there’s been some work on that recently here by WFP and here by Ren Ryba of Animal Ask.
There’s some discussion of an example of Atlantic cod by Horta, 2010, revisited by Browning & Veit, 2023 (talk). The example is excerpted from the talk and discussed here on the EA Forum.
FWIW, fertility and mortality rates in crustaceans and fish are often (almost always?) extremely high compared to mammals, and the vast majority die very young. I pulled out some statistics here (footnote 8). Some more in the tables of Butler et al., 1993 and Table 11.1 from Bauer, 2023. Kawaguhi (2016) reports estimates from other studies of 7,200, 7,500 and 12,343 eggs produced per female Antarctic krill on average per year (I don’t know what share are actually fertilized and born).
Thanks that’s helpful!