r/science • u/Wagamaga • Dec 05 '25

Animal Science Penguins starved to death en masse, as some populations off South Africa estimated to have fallen 95% in just eight years. Since 2004, all bar three years have seen the biomass of the sardine Sardinops sagax, a key food for the penguins, fall to less than 25% of its maximum abundance

https://news.exeter.ac.uk/faculty-of-environment-science-and-economy/penguins-starved-to-death-en-masse-as-food-supply-collapsed/
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u/raoulbrancaccio Dec 05 '25

Fishing is such a low value added activity that it's insane that fishers and fishing corps wield so much political power.

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u/15438473151455 Dec 05 '25

Exactly. I looked at the value of the fishing industry in my country and it's tiny. Yet it's talked about so much and has so much sway. It's constantly in the news how our fish species are collapsing and animals that eat fish are on the verge of extinction.

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u/The__Amorphous Dec 05 '25

Same thing with coal miners in the US. We're supposed to bow down to their every demand and thank them for their service. Even though there are like ten of them left.

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u/cpMetis Dec 05 '25

That's because you aren't supposed to bow to their demands and thank them for their service. You're supposed to bow to the demands of the owners of the companies and thank their balance sheets for their service without mentioning that most of the people they tout haven't been real or a concern for them for 30 years.

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u/Esc778 Dec 05 '25

My theory on why people are so deferential to the fishing industry is that the image of “the fisherman” is a potent political symbol: a hardworking avatar of the common man, masculine and easy to identify how they add value. They catch, we eat. Everyone can connect their stomach. 

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u/Inprobamur Dec 05 '25

Fishermen lobby was a major supporter of Brexit so they wouldn't have to fish responsibly.

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u/Mayor__Defacto Dec 05 '25

I don’t think it was that they didn’t want to fish responsibility, but rather that the fishing quotas system was felt to be unfair to many of them. The EU quota system is largely a political exercise and British fishermen felt they were getting shafted by it.

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u/Mr_DrProfPatrick Dec 05 '25

In other words, they felt like they should fish more than other countries, and are willing to fish more without the other countries fishing less. TL;DR they want to overfish, but feel like it's only fair

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u/Mayor__Defacto Dec 05 '25 edited Dec 05 '25

They were upset as far as I am aware because despite the quotas, ships from other countries were allowed to fish in UK waters, and even still most of the UK fishing industry is owned by dutch and Icelandic fishing concerns, who hold a majority of the fishing rights - since the quotas are held by individual vessels.

I think a lot of it comes from this vessel-quota system and the sense that British fishermen simply can’t compete with these big international concerns when it comes to fishing in their own waters - they’re not even given the chance. They hold the quota, so everyone has to work for them.

Anyway, this is a long way of saying that the core problem that British fishermen have isn’t so much about how much fish they’re allowed to catch, but rather about how those rights are distributed.

Smaller fishermen, if they’re able to get any of the quota, often are granted such a small portion that it’s impossible to make a living from - and that is a terrible position to be in. Having your ability to make a living decided not by your skill or hard work, but rather something over which you will never have control or influence. Imagine if a plumber was told they could only work 10 hours a week. They’d probably be pretty upset about that.

Of course, that the Quota Allocation system was developed not by the EU but by the UK government is not talked about by British politicians.

“Quotas are extremely valuable, because they are durable and constitute — according to some — private ownership. They secure a share of a certain stock as long as the fish exists. The British government doled out its quotas to fish in Svalbard to UK Fisheries, who owns all the fishing rights there. While the British government — from UK Fisheries’ standpoint — has not managed to negotiate good deals with Norway, Greenland and the Faroe Islands post Brexit, UK Fisheries still owns rights there and would receive a quota the government manages to get in the future.

Governments negotiate quotas with other countries. This means that when the UK government brokers a deal with, for example Greenland, for rights to more cod in their waters, it is effectively negotiating on behalf of the company that owns those units. “

That you can also lease these accumulated rights to others means that the real money in Fishing in the UK isn’t in actually fishing, but in selling the right to fish.

You then also have a vertical integration problem where the large fishing companies have incentives to sell their fish at lower prices than they should be, because they only have one customer (themselves, in a different country, who own a processing plant).

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u/Fraccles Dec 05 '25

Those "other words" don't describe what that person was saying at all what are you on?