Hi Vasco,
This graph does include wild shrimp. I’ve made the change to the axes you suggested and updated the figure caption to note that wild shrimp are included. Thanks for your suggestions!
Hannah McKay🔸
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Forecasting farmed animal numbers in 2033
Strategies for helping farmed shrimp
What hurts shrimp the most? (Quantifying and prioritizing shrimp welfare threats)
Thanks for your engagement with the report and this question! Our next report is now out, which addresses this to some extent. We found that mortality does decrease as farm intensity increases, but the data here is limited. I also did a quick BOTEC (numbers are rounded):
This is very rough and mortality rate is going to vary hugely between farms and over time, but it suggests that your suspicion is correct—it looks like extensive farms could be responsible for the highest fraction of shrimp deaths, followed by intensive farms.Details on data in the BOTEC:
Our first report found that 440 billion shrimp are slaughtered annually.
Proportion of production is reported by Boyd et al. (2022, p.33), who estimate that in 2018 it was 11.5% Extensive, 16.7% Semi-intensive, and 71.8% Intensive. They don’t report super-intensive, so we assume at the time it was <1%. But, because this source is ~6 years old and the industry has likely intensified since then, we put it at 1%, and reduce the other three farm types by 0.333…%.
Mortality rates from our new pre-slaughter mortality report (see Figure 6), I took the mean of the means reported for each farm type.
Hi Andrew Rowan, thanks for engaging with our work!
I agree that sometimes graphs where the smallest groups are difficult to see can make it hard to draw conclusions about those animals. That is one reason we moved the graphs with credible intervals to the appendix, as they made it even harder to see animals other than insects. However, for this report, our aim was to provide rough numbers to help with prioritisation, which makes showing the relative trends the most useful visualisation. The raw data is avaliable in the tables and linked methods spreadsheet if you want to examine the other groups more.
Your point about crop yields to support agricultural expansion is really important. This is currently one of the cruxes of how the farmed insect industry might grow – while farmed black soldier fly larvae could in theory eat any substrate, they currently are fed cereal and grains, which as you say could be a limiting factor for industry growth. On the other hand, if insect farming does expand, insects could be used as feed for the other farmed animal groups, which would make crop yields less of a limiting factor.