
Tuna are spawning in marine protected areas - el_duderino
https://news.mit.edu/2019/tuna-spawn-marine-protected-sanctuaries-0724
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jbattle
To show my kids a bit about programming we made a simple rabbits-and-foxes
simulation. Little dots moving around a rectangle drawn on the screen. The red
ones were rabbits, would move mostly randomly, and would periodically make a
baby rabbit. The blue ones were foxes and would chase nearby rabbits. When
they caught one they'd eat it and make a baby fox.

Fun to watch but we found no matter how we set the initial counts of rabbits
and foxes, inevitably there'd be a population spike of rabbits, which would
cause a lot of foxes to be born, which would eat enough rabbits (sometimes ALL
of them) that the rest of the foxes would starve and go extinct.

We tweaked all kinds of parameters about how they move and how they reproduce
and nothing kept the system from oscillating into a broken state.

Eventually we added a "rabbit preserve" \- an area rabbits could pass freely
through but foxes couldn't enter. Just like that - the system was stable(ish).
There would still be population peaks and valleys but as long as the preserve
was reasonably large the rabbit population might crater but wouldn't crash.

Its a nice little project, easy to code and fun to watch

~~~
microcolonel
Add earthworms. ;- )

~~~
alanh
Is this a joke or reference, perhaps?

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nisten
So by not fishing at all in the protected 11% portion of their fishing area,
they're projected to get more fish due to the spillover effect. Well, no
surprises there.

We rarely ever do these economic projections.

They can apply to so many more areas, like the forests in Indonesia where
they're discovering new antibiotic compounds in shrubs, or the spider habitats
whose venom is used in producing heart medication, they're probably a lot more
expensive than some lumber and cornfields.

I feel like if we communicated environmental protection more materialistically
instead of emotionally, people would have an easier time convincing their
politicians to actually enact it.

If we're gonna calculate 25-30 year mortgages for homes than we should
probably do environmental risk projections too in dollar figures for those
kinds of time frames.

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bglazer
One argument against this position is that economic environmentalism cuts both
ways. Sure

Sure, marine preserves produce an economically beneficial surplus of salmon.
Also, the oil reserves in the Arctic national wildlife refuge are worth more
than 500 billion dollars.

In the case of Arctic drilling, I think the moral argument against destroying
wilderness is the only viable option.

~~~
noahth
There is a strong economic argument for keeping oil in the ground now, though.
Namely, that the planet will cease to support a functioning global economy
under runaway warming.

~~~
hdfbdtbcdg
That oil could theoretically be burned and the carbon sequestered. Hence no
climate impact.

The hazard to fragile ecosystems from an industrial accident is still huge.

Edit: the point is that some environmental protection actions have to be
driven by moral/ethical forces. We can't leave everything to the economy.

Having said this there might be ways to use market forces to implement the
ethically required environmental protections.

~~~
nisten
Well, if they can afford to pay market-rate insurance on the liability of
their sequestration method then yeah sure.

~~~
Gravityloss
Interesting thought. I know nuclear plants are required by law to set aside a
part of revenue for eventual long term storage of the waste. You could have
that for coal plants.

Of course we already have quotas and trade which is designed for something
similar.

And the offsets have their problems...

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ergothus
> The researchers observed multiple species of tuna larvae throughout this
> protected expanse

Somehow I've gone over 40 years without realizing that fish have a larval
stage.

~~~
flukus
I'm in the same boat, I assume like me you were thinking of larvae and maggots
as being synonymous, but it looks like with fish the larval stage is more
tadpole like:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichthyoplankton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichthyoplankton)

~~~
ergothus
I knew of tadpoles, and I knew fish eggs, but somehow I guess I just imagined
fish hatching as tiny fish.

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Symbiote
This is the original article. It's open access!

I'm surprised MIT's press release doesn't link to it.

[https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-47161-0](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-47161-0)

