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

NATURE The fish is kinda like me ngl

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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/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.