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by j13n 852 days ago
Nueva Pescanova is already sizing up cages.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-59667645

3 comments

> Nueva Pescanova is already sizing up cages.

Please don't make false accusations about a third part without a minimum understanding of the matter first.

Nueva Pescanova has nothing to do with this case, and I doubt that they would be interested at all in breeding a deep sea (and, most probably, non edible) species.

Come now, it wouldn’t be a normal HN conversation on octopuses if we didn’t debate whether to eat them or not.
Nothing to do with the controversy, just curious: Why would deep-sea octopuses not be edible?
Deep sea cephalopods accumulate ammonia in their body as a buoyant device. This way, they don't need to spend so much energy swimming. Ammonia is fairly toxic, so they would taste either like pee, or like poison. I had touched some of this animals and the smell of rancid fat and urine last for days in your hands

Also if you put this animals at the surface they will literally burst from inside and turn into a mushy mess. I had explained this yet a few times before, but for some reason this particular Muusoctopus nursery is a recurrent history on HN.

Octopuses are benthic, so they could store a different amount of ammonia, but my bet would be that such partially disintegrated octopus product would look and taste awful. None of the other species of deep sea octopuses are fished commercially.

Joke's on you, we're into that:

Hongeo-hoe is a type of fermented fish dish from Korea's Jeolla province. Hongeo-hoe is made from skate and emits a very strong, characteristic ammonia-like odor

Skates (hongeo) are cartilaginous fish that excrete uric acid through the skin, rather than by urinating as other animals do. As they ferment, ammonia is produced, which helps preserve the flesh and gives the fish its distinctive, powerful odor.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hongeo-hoe

I know that some sharks and rays had a more or less strong pee taste. I personally dislike it. Skate is the only dish that I would classify as dog food grade. The line between tasty and nasty is very thin in those fishes and requires a skilled chef.

But I'm perfectly fine with the idea of some people loving the pee taste, or eating rotten shark meat, or urinating in other people's mouths while eating carp croquettes. As long as those people is not me, good for them. I'll pass. Thank you.

Feel free to eat this new discovered octopus before any other human and tell us about your experience. My bet is that will be memorable for all the wrong reasons

In any case, skate meat should be forbidden by conservation issues. Their populations are very fragile and on a sharp decline, and to eat this animals is very irresponsible.

I just wanted to say I thoroughly appreciate your contribution to this thread. Equal parts intellectually interesting and belly-laugh worthy
Wait, that can't be right, you must be talking about some particular species, they're everywhere in Briti-- oh. Common Skate is critically endangered.

It's also about £8.50 for 500g.

ffs. We are, collectively, utter morons aren't we?

The ammonia content of Greenland Shark doesn't prevent them from being a treat:

The traditional method begins with gutting and beheading a shark and placing it in a shallow hole dug in gravelly sand, with the cleaned cavity resting on a small mound of sand. The shark is then covered with sand and gravel, and stones are placed on top of the sand in order to press the fluids out of the body. The shark ferments in this fashion for six to twelve weeks, depending on the season. Following this curing period, the shark is cut into strips and hung to dry for several months. During this drying period, a brown crust will develop, which is removed prior to cutting the shark into small pieces and serving.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A1karl

From your link:

> Those new to it [Hákarl] may gag involuntarily at the first attempt to eat it because of the high ammonia content.

I think its pretty obvious the comment you are replying to was a joke.
TYFYS, doing your part to Stop The Spread of dis-and-or-misinformation!

I usually accept any given internet comment as unimpeachable truth, and was just about to fire off a bunch of angry hate mail to Nueva Pescanova because of this specific thing!

Gosh, would I have felt silly to find out that they're not literally building cages for this particular species!

Do you have a source for your claim that nobody in this company is currently planning to build cages 10,000' underwater for a species that was just discovered?

I find it weird that people won't eat meat and poultry, but still eat fish and seafood and sometimes cite environmental reasons.

Most fish are caught and some sea based farming efforts have been pretty terrible for the environment.

I reckon if you want to eat meat still you should mostly be eating chicken.

"I reckon if you want to eat meat still you should mostly be eating chicken. "

But favorably chicken that has seen the sun and real soil to pick in, not only on the way to the slaughterhouse.

And there is nothing inheritently wrong with fishing, it is just that the way it is usually done, is quite horrific. But there is somewhat certified ethical fishing. Or local fishermen.

The massive problem with fishing is that the fish are wild. They need to get replaced by nature. You can’t scale up the operation. Add to that pollution, warming seas, and you’re disturbing a system way too much.

What’s the plan once the oceans are messed up permanently?

At this moment, I think factory farmed chicken would have less impact on the environment.

The oceans are huge.

When you are not overfishing and destroying the ground with bad trawling, where is the problem?

(But yes, it is a problem, that both is done)

The oceans warming is a separate problem.

And I like fish as well as chicken as well as beef. But I don't have to eat it every day.

At this point wouldn’t it be easier to artificially select for traits that make the chicken mind more tolerant of poor conditions? Like if we can have consciousless chicken then it wouldn’t matter the condition they grow under?
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has you covered here, with sentient cows engineered to be ecstatic about the thought of being killed for meat.
This seems problematic in a different way.
It sounds way easier, to continue to pretend, that animals don't have feelings. And in general not know too much of the meat factories. Which is why many people choose this approach.

Also like the sibling comment said, not really possible with our tech and knowledge. Lab grown meat would be the way to go to achieve it.

That is one heck of a story. Salient to discussion about consciousness: to what extent does the ability to act like awareness, count as awareness for the purposes of outside observers?
This guy is way ahead of you: https://www.wired.com/2012/02/headless-chicken-solution/

I imagine the meat would be pretty tasteless though.

You would need a clearer working model of consciousnes to be able to know whether your efforts were succeeding. But this is the idea behind lab-grown meat, just don't grow the brain at all and you don't have to worry as much.
There are other reasons than environmental for eating fish but not meat.

I used to be pescatarian and my main reason for that was factory farming. Once reason I now eat meat is that it has become a lot easier to buy meat that has been well treated.

Before I was a programmer, I was a marine biologist and also worked as a fish farmer.

By virtually all metrics, intensive land-based animal farming is much harder on the environment. Also, in terms of animal welfare, its super sketchy even with animals labeled organic.

The misinformation around fish farming is absurd. I think people want to believe in the myth that commercial fishing is a couple guys in a wooden boat; when its actually a floating factory discarding up to half or more of what it kills.

There are many aquatic things I won't eat but mostly it is of the "wild fish" variety (overfishing, pollution, mercury, bycatch). I worked a single season as a fisheries observer in Alaska. The destruction was maddening.

I put wild fish in quotes because many times they are raised in a hatcheries then released into the wild. Which has ruined the gene pool of salmon in places that do this.

After a few years raising chickens at my home farm, I became pescatarian. I drew an arbitrary line at intelligence where I wouldn't eat anything as smart or smarter than a chicken.

Anyhow, avoiding farmed fish while eating land meat is really misinformed. I think the meat industry and commercial fishing industries have managed to completely misinform the American public (and a few well-meaning but misleading documentaries on the subject).

America doesn't not farm very many aquatic things besides oysters, trout and catfish. Which are all very very green industries. I like to bring these ones up in conversations about this topic.

At the moment my line of thinking is “what’s easier to engineer around?”

I’m not saying we should eat “land meat”. I’m saying specifically chicken. I believe they are the most cost effective of the meats.

Of the farmed fish, did you single out trout and catfish because they are green, or has the industry in general improved?

I think it's more to do with us being able to empathize more easily with other land animals because we're biologically similar. Fish can't scream in pain or show basically any emotion we'd recognize at all. They're so different it's like looking at a wiggling steak, so it's trivial to dismiss them as simple automatons.
It takes some effort, but you can buy responsibly raised/caught seafood. https://www.seafoodwatch.org/recommendations/download-consum...
because people feel less close from fish and seashell than birds, and less close than birds than mammals.
I refuse to eat Octopus based on its level of sentience.

I regularly eat pig despite a higher level of sentience. And despite having had far more interactions with pigs compared to Octopus.

Point being, we humans really are not rational with our food choices.

>Most fish are caught

Overfishing aside, I guess you would most often find people that believe hunting /fishing for your food is more ethical than farming it

Which is absurd when you realize that commercial fishing kills up to half or more than what it catches.
Hunting/fishing for food was really more ethical many millennia ago, when humans were fewer than wild terrestrial vertebrates.

Nowadays, there are many more humans and domestic animals than wild terrestrial vertebrates, so hunting could not sustain any non-negligible fraction of the humans.

The modern methods of fishing are much too wasteful, so neither fishing has any future.

From an ecological perspective, farming is probably better than fishing wild species no?
Nah fishing wild is better assuming your catch rate is sustainable for the population. Farming means taking acres of natural area with a careful web of ecological interactions that took millions of years to develop as such, and replacing all of that with a temperamental monocrop sometimes as far as the eye can see. It would be like if we fished by first sterilizing the ocean and then growing up some goldfish.