20h ago

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There's a whole quantitative science of this in fishery management. It's called "maximum sustainable yield." I wish I could find the quote, but someone very accurately summarized the whole philosophy as "preserving the wreckage."

What are those magestic white jellyfish? They seem to be thriving.
- Are they really plastic trash bags? 😭
  
  Aren't We all plastic trash bags in a way.
- They seem to reproduce very quickly

How are you quantifying the amount of each species in the past? Or is this just wish-fulfillment hogwash?
E: Ah yes, the hive-mind defense, downvoting something you have no answer for.
- Assuming you're not just trolling peopke who care about the environment, I have an actual evidence based answer here, current levels of biomass in the ocean aren't really known, and are difficult to estimate[0]. They're very widely regarded as dropping heavily as a result of human interference and climate change.
  I think you might be misreading the comic though, which I think is more an explanation a shifting baseline, where the first panel is compared to the second, rather than the first which would be the correct reference point for a natural population[1].
  It's almost certainly not meant to be representative of the actual species, aside from anything else the size ratio between say, pufferfish, turtles and whales are obviously wrong, but again, I don't think the comic is trying to pretend it's accurate in that respect.
  [0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867419312747#bib8
  [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline
  
  Thank you!!
- There's lots of fish species in danger of going extinct
- Do you have evidence that oceans were less plentiful in the past? Or are you just taking a contrarian position because it's easy?
  
  Again, I'm NOT the one that needs to provide evidence, because I have made no claims.
  The ORIGINAL POSTER needs to provide proof because their "meme" is an infograph with a claim.
  You're twisting the burden of proof, so go f yourself for your bad faith.
- Calling it "wish-fulfilment" doesn't help and makes it sound like you're not actually asking for an answer.
  Who exactly was wishing for such a sad scenario to be true?
  
  The image is, if you read left to right and top to bottom, moving backwards in time.
  I'm not asking why things got to the point they are at today. I'm asking how someone can just populate an image about the ocean hundreds of years ago off of pure vibes.
  There is no science behind just adding more animals to increase the fauna/flora density by entirely subjective amounts here. And I can say that it isn't just meant to show an increase because specific years are used, as well as 3 data ponts, so the density of animals in question is the point.
  The wish-fulfillment, because we're moving back in time, is that the ocean was that full of life all those years ago. Unless backed by evidence. Which no one has presented so far.

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