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As Fish Stocks Collapse, Overpopulated Lobsters Resort to Cannibalism
The Maine lobster population is booming, but it turns out that's bad news if you're a little lobster: "'We've got the lobsters feeding back on themselves just because they're so abundant,' said Richard Wahle, a marine sciences professor at the University of Maine, who is supervising the research. 'It's never been observed just out in the open like this,' he said."
Abundance caused by populations of their predators collapsing.
Soylent Red is lobsters!!!!
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...is getting pinched.
If you want to order lobster in a restaurant they will still charge "Market Price."
It's a worrisome development and means that overfishing is collapsing the local ecosystem.
It's no joke, and it's happening all over the world, the scenario is converging for a catastrophic decline in fish populations.
Mad lobster disease.
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We go to the market and see the fish case always stocked. But the thing to realize, that as species are being fished out, they fill the case with other species. And prices on some species are skyrocketing.
Farming isn't very viable in many cases because they feed the farmed fish wild caught fish and the cages pollute the ecosystem so badly that the wild fish start to die out. Trout and Talpia are the only ones IIRC that are farmed sustainably - definitely not salmon.
And the thing that kills me, the next time you look at the fish case in the super market, bare in mind that at least half of what's in there will be thrown away.
We are so wasteful that it's just disgusting.
I hope this leaves enough cave lobster for my Dwarves!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Why is Lobster still so expensive?
Originally, lobster was originally poor-people's food. In the USA New-England area in both pre-colonial times, they were so plentiful that native americans and early colonists could simply catch them from tidal pools along the shoreline. This made lobsters cheap food to serve toe prisoners and indentured servant (those that bartered for passage to the "new-world" with labor contracts). With the Cod populations crashing, it sounds like we are going back to those times...
The reason lobster got expensive was that transportation costs used to be a large part of the price. Also over time, with most profitible businesses, often the infrastructure determines the price more than the supply. People that own parts of the infrastructure (fishing territories, relay-holding ponds, lobster gangs, etc) demand a price level to keep their profit margin the same even when the underlying commodity supply goes up which would nominally send the price down.
I think we're approaching a fishcal cliff...
Quantity available is only one factor in price. Cost to acquire, transport, store, and market also add in. Live lobsters are expensive to transport and store, and lobster meet turns to mush if frozen.
There's an old anecdote that's appropriate here. If there were a huge pile of gold bars on the moon, it wouldn't be economical to go get them.
(seafood is typically cheap on the coasts, where beef is expensive. in the central and midwest, beef is cheap and seafood is expensive)
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Maine.
"No wonder those humans are always trying to eat us...we're delicious!"
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Aren't tasty? what? Lobster is the ultimate white meat.
preparation? A live lobster and a pot of boiling water. This is not hard, people. If you can;t tell if your lobster is alive, it probably isn't, and never cook dead (or dying) lobster.
Quick primer. Boil until the shell is bright red, plunging the lobster in headfirst. It never realized it was dead.
Serve with baked potato, corn on the cob or greeen geans, plenty of melted butter available. Crack the claws off and open, pull out the meat, drop it in the butter. inCrack off the tail, tear off the tail fins and suck on them like candy :). take a cunck of claw meat and eat that, making room for the tail in the butter. If you're lazy, this is it. Otherwise, the knuckles above the claw have meat, each leg has a thread of meat, those tail fins usually do also. there is meat all through the body (carapace), and a little work nearly doubles your haul. Or give it to someone who knows how to get in there. Avoid the tomalley if you don't know what it is.
How to tell if yo got a Maine lobster? Measure the carapace, which had better measure between 3 1/2 and 5 inches from the end of the carapace to the edge of the eye socket. Cheating is very rare in Maine waters, lobstermen will send each other to jail over this... If it is shorter, good chance it came from Canada, or possibly Massachussetts. Those big spots the tail when raw/live? That is not a Maine lobster, probably a Longostino, which is not a lobster. Most are actually shrimp.
Sorry, I love lobster, and miss it so.
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Whoever first ate lobster.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Lobster doesn't freeze well.
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Maybe you're too young to remember, or you can't find it easily on the Internets, but back in the 60s when I was a kid, my family used to own French House Island off Jonesport in Maine, and we'd be up there every summer.
It had been observed then.
Now, that said, there's nothing better than Maine Lobster. We used to make blueberry pancakes from the blueberries on the island, and eat fresh lobster in butter, as well as clams we dug up and mussels.
But just because you can't find it observed this century doesn't mean it's "never been observed".
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Wouldn't you?
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Lobsters do this anyway.
Source: my degree in Marine Biology.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
all the vegetarians out there... They should eat more meat.
Considering the primitive brain those bugs have, I fail to see why anyone would be surprised at their cannibalism, the rule of thumb in the ocean is anything you can eat, you do eat. 90% of my goldfish and koi fry are lost to cannibalism and predation.
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