Thanks for your reply, Vasco—all clear and comprehensive. I’d only dispute the claim from How Wild-Caught Fishing Affects Wild-Animal Suffering: ‘for example, catching big piscivorous fish may reduce zooplankton populations, while catching small zooplanktivorous fish may increase zooplankton populations.’ - this does not consider the full balance of the trophic chain, and the fact that if you remove big piscivorous fish, you are in fact on the SHORT TERM increasing the population of zooplankton, however, this have many complex effects, one example: the decrease in the Caribbean shark population is met by an increase in its prey, the grouper fish. The expanding grouper population takes parrotfish, normally responsible for clearing coral of algae, in greater numbers. This could explain why algae now dominates many degraded reefs in the Caribbean. It also shows how the systematic elimination of one species—a key link in a complex web of relationships—can destabilize the entire ecosystem. When it comes to wild animals, no impact is so straightforward and isolated as we’d like to measure. This is my pet critic with EA, as the difficulty in measuring the clean direct impact of efforts in wildlife conservation can be hindering funds to these efforts, however, in the larger sense, the strategy to leave the ocean alone to rebalance its ecosystems is about saving all life on Earth—therefore the investment on ocean conservation has strong direct links to Existential Risk—ours and of all life on Earth. Perhaps this is a conversation to another topic/ thread...!!
Thanks for your reply, Vasco—all clear and comprehensive. I’d only dispute the claim from How Wild-Caught Fishing Affects Wild-Animal Suffering: ‘for example, catching big piscivorous fish may reduce zooplankton populations, while catching small zooplanktivorous fish may increase zooplankton populations.’ - this does not consider the full balance of the trophic chain, and the fact that if you remove big piscivorous fish, you are in fact on the SHORT TERM increasing the population of zooplankton, however, this have many complex effects, one example: the decrease in the Caribbean shark population is met by an increase in its prey, the grouper fish. The expanding grouper population takes parrotfish, normally responsible for clearing coral of algae, in greater numbers. This could explain why algae now dominates many degraded reefs in the Caribbean. It also shows how the systematic elimination of one species—a key link in a complex web of relationships—can destabilize the entire ecosystem. When it comes to wild animals, no impact is so straightforward and isolated as we’d like to measure. This is my pet critic with EA, as the difficulty in measuring the clean direct impact of efforts in wildlife conservation can be hindering funds to these efforts, however, in the larger sense, the strategy to leave the ocean alone to rebalance its ecosystems is about saving all life on Earth—therefore the investment on ocean conservation has strong direct links to Existential Risk—ours and of all life on Earth. Perhaps this is a conversation to another topic/ thread...!!