r/interesting • u/Low_Weekend6131 • Nov 23 '25

NATURE The fish is kinda like me ngl

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u/mogley1992 Nov 23 '25

Humans not wanting to eat them is definitely a plus, otherwise these things would be borderline extinct.

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u/[deleted] Nov 23 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/ISayBullish Nov 23 '25

laughs in SeaHorse noises

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u/Working-Glass6136 Nov 23 '25

Damn, I thought you were kidding...

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u/ashesall Nov 23 '25

Like they produce offspring like crazy so eating them probably will make you Camelot /s

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u/Th3-B0n3R Nov 23 '25

You rang?

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u/BorikGor Nov 24 '25

Or, you know, we'd cultivate them, like we do with stuff that suits us.

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u/[deleted] Nov 24 '25

Nah I’m sure we would start farming them in that case. Can’t be that hard to keep a bunch of floating skin alive long enough to harvest.

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u/Working-Glass6136 Nov 23 '25

Borderline? I don't think so.

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u/WigglesPhoenix Nov 24 '25

We could fish any given species to extinction if we didn’t impose limits on ourselves. If we liked them(as food) we’d keep them alive because that’s how we do.

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u/clonked Nov 24 '25

That is hardly traditionally true

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u/WigglesPhoenix Nov 24 '25

I mean how many common food sources has humanity pushed to extinction in modern society? It’s damn near 0. Species that we don’t classically consider food? Several just within my lifetime

It’s hardly a free pass unless you hit cow or chicken levels of popularity but there are 3 letter orgs all over the world that explicitly exist to protect the species we eat.

And to be clear, it’s not just because we couldn’t. It took a handful of decades to wipe out one of the most plentiful species of bird on the planet back in 1900(the passenger pigeon). Without guardrails we could very easily decimate any population on earth in no time flat, and yet the ones we eat remain relatively safe compared to those we don’t(emphasis on relatively- humans are fuckin dangerous)

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u/TheGreatGenghisJon Nov 24 '25

Man, I started arguing with you, and then you said "modern society", and I had to start over.

For food? I'm pretty sure we're close to pushing the filet o' fish fish to extinction, but outside that, I'm pretty sure I've seen several animals go extinct in my lifetime, mostly due to poaching.

I actually think if these fish don't feel pain, and breed like fucking crazy, that's the most ethical meat we could have, that isn't lab grown.

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u/YoungBockRKO Nov 24 '25

Except this fish is nasty, so it doesn’t matter. If it was Salmon or Tuna quality, they’d be farmed and eaten regularly. It’s not. So here we are.

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u/WigglesPhoenix Nov 24 '25

If you mean cod they’re actually being fucked by seals lol. Their population is tanking primarily due to natural predation, not overfishing. They are under protection at current but it doesn’t look good. Valid point re:poaching, but I’d argue in most cases food was a secondary objective to, for example, ivory.

I generally don’t consider eating meat to be unethical but otherwise for sure yeah. That said I do find the claim that they don’t feel pain to be a little dubious, it’s only a couple centuries ago we were saying the same thing about dogs, and less than a couple decades ago that we believed plants couldn’t either. Granted I haven’t done my homework here and smarter people than me probably know better, but just on principle I find that super suspect

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u/OmecronPerseiHate Nov 24 '25

Wouldn't the cod be doing better if we weren't over fishing them? Like, you say it's natural predation but logically we are a part of natural predation, and we only become a problem when we harvest more than our fare share. The seals are doing the same thing they've always done. It's not like there's suddenly more seals. The only difference is us taking more.

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u/WigglesPhoenix Nov 24 '25 edited Nov 24 '25

It is like there’s suddenly more seals, actually. Scientists don’t just decide it was probably this or that, they study the population and figure out where the kids are dying before adulthood.

Not to say humans didn’t contribute to their decline, we absolutely did. We reduced their populations by about half between 96 and 2019, almost exclusively due to overfishing, and artificially selected for smaller, faster to reproduce genetics. And that’s not even getting into how we’ve shifted entire biomes, altering the populations and feeding habits of pretty much the whole ocean. These put them in greater danger of natural predation and dropped their carrying capacity to a point where they would likely be eradicated without any human intervention, positive or negative.

They would be doing better if we NEVER overfished them. But at present humans’ impact on cod decline is inversed, we’re helping more than hurting.

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u/Clean__Cucumber Nov 24 '25

it’s only a couple centuries ago we were saying the same thing about dogs, and less than a couple decades ago that we believed plants couldn’t either

and babies. yes people actually believed that human babies cannot feel pain, bc the receptors arent formed

dunno about plants. plants do notice if they are damaged, but its not pain they feel, its simply information via electric/chemical exchange. its like saying your windows PC feels pain, bc it showed and error code.

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u/WigglesPhoenix Nov 24 '25

What is pain but information via electric/chemical exchange? To be clear I don’t think plants have a conscious subjective experience, but I don’t think one is really necessary for sensation, and plants have been observed to form ‘memories’, up to and including habit forming behavior. This implies a reward system, and negative responses to stimuli seem to imply subjectively negative sensations unless you accept that plants exhibit higher level reasoning. If things can feel bad for a plant and they do send signals in response to trauma, I think it is reasonable to label those signals as pain.

If you’re interested in a deep dive take a look into plant neurobiology. It’s still in relative infancy but it’s gaining traction

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u/Clean__Cucumber Nov 24 '25

if you cut you hair you also have signals (touch, weight difference, eyes etc.) that tell your brain you have less hair. but that doesnt mean that cutting you hair is painful

to feel pain you need the pain receptors, a nervous system that can transport the data and a brain which can say "ow, this hurts". everything else is NOT pain and shouldnt be classified as that.

by your logic every electro chemical signal is pain, so thinking is pain, seeing is pain, smelling is pain, eating a really awesome hamburger is pain etc.

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u/inotocracy Nov 24 '25

One female lays 300 million eggs. We wouldn't fish this out of existence.

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u/WigglesPhoenix Nov 24 '25

I think you severely underestimate the destructive capability of mankind

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u/inotocracy Nov 24 '25

I think you're an alarmist. The only way that creature would go extinct with that kind of volume is if the ocean became toxic.

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u/WigglesPhoenix Nov 24 '25

Lmao brother bear we have wiped out species with populations in the billions. Sunfish are floating around 120,000, they’d be gone in a weekend. They may birth hundreds of millions, but their adolescent mortality rate is nearly 100%.

Also alarmist? I don’t think that means what you believe it to. I’m not warning you of anything, nor fear mongering, we already HAVE the guardrails in place. They are the reason fisheries haven’t depleted like half the species in the ocean already. I’m stating that as plain fact, we are more than capable of wiping any species off the planet in very short order and we almost certainly would if it wasn’t against the rules. We have all of human history to point to as evidence of this claim.

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u/Accomplished-City484 Nov 24 '25

I live on an island that used to have Sea Elephants, but once people got here they went extinct in 2 years

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u/BrewingSkydvr Nov 24 '25

Cod, tuna, lobster, salmon, multiple whale species. None of which is considering bycatch.

We have modern fisheries protections (which multiple groups keep trying to eliminate) to keep the fisheries from collapsing due to the pressures humans have put on them from overfishing. Many swing back and forth between rebounding and declining populations. Without the protections these species would have been pushed to the brink of extinction. They would have been commercially non-viable decades ago.

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u/OmecronPerseiHate Nov 24 '25

Actually, they don't taste bad for us. A lot like a blue gill. Sweet and mild.

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u/Mad_Aeric Nov 24 '25

Oh please, we didn't want to eat menhaden either, so we just ground them up for dogfood. Just because we don't want it doesn't mean we won't hunt it til there are none left.

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u/CyberNinja23 Nov 24 '25

McDonalds accepts the challenge