i'm reminded of an anecdote from a bud about objecting to tossing trash out of a moving train in India only for an aggravated passenger to snatch it from him and do it for him. Upon exiting the train at dawn, rows of trash on either side of the tracks. Or this scene from mad man on us doing the same not long ago:
I remember that scene, but I can't remember my family ever doing that after a picnic. I wonder how common it really was.
"Because these changes happen slowly, over a human lifetime, they never startle. They just tiptoe silently along, helping us all adjust to a smaller, shrunken world." Big Fish Stories Getting Littler February 5, 2014 11:38 AM ET By Robert Krulwich They came, they fished, then snap! They posed. Right in front of their Big Catch — and thereby hangs a tale. Courtesy of Monroe County Public Library For generations, tour boats have been collecting fishing enthusiasts in Key West, Fla.: taking them for a day of deep sea casting; providing them rods, bait, companionship; and then, when the day ends, there's a little wharf-side ceremony. Everyone is invited to take his biggest fish and hook it onto the "Hanging Board"; a judge compares catches, chooses a champion, and then the family that caught the biggest fish poses for a photograph. The one up above comes from 1958. Notice that the fish on the far left is bigger than the guy who, I assume, caught it; and their little girl is smaller than most of the "biggies" on the board. Those aren't little people. Those are big fish. Here's another one from the year before — 1957. Again, the fish loom larger than the people. Check out the guy in the back, standing on the extreme right, next to an even bigger giant. Courtesy of Monroe County Public Library Charter companies have been taking these photos for at least 50 years now. In some cases, they've operated from the same dock, fished in the same waters and returned to the same Hanging Board for all that time — which is why, when a grad student working on her doctoral thesis found a thick stack of these photos in Key West's Monroe County Library, she got very excited. Loren McClenachan figured she could use this parade of biggies to compare fish over time. For example, here's a photo taken a decade after the previous shots — during the 1965-1979 period: Courtesy of Monroe County Public Library The fish in that one are still big, but no longer bigger than the fishermen. It's the same in this next one. Grandma and Grandpa are decidedly the biggest animals in the photo: Courtesy of Monroe County Public Library Let's keep going. This next photo was taken during the 1980-1985 period. It's a group shot, one of many. Everybody's displaying their biggest catches. Loren visited this wharf in 2007 and discovered, as she writes in her scientific paper, that these display boards "had not changed over time," which meant she could measure the board, and then (using the photos) measure the fish. Clearly, these fish are way smaller than the ones from the 1950s: Courtesy of Monroe County Public Library How much smaller? Adjusting for time of year, and after checking and measuring 1,275 different trophy fish, she found that in the 1950s, the biggest fish in the photos were typically over 6 feet — sometimes 6 feet 5 inches long. By the time we get to 2007, when Loren bought a ticket on a deep sea day cruise and snapped this picture ... Courtesy of Loren McClenachan ... the biggest fish were averaging only a foot, or maybe a little over. That's a staggering change. The biggest fish on display in 2007 was a shark, and sharks, Loren calculated, are now half the size they used to be in the '50s. As to weight, she figured the average prizewinner dropped from nearly 43.8 pounds to a measly 5 pounds — an 88 percent drop. It's no big surprise, I suppose, that fish in the sea are getting smaller. The curious thing, though, is that people who pay 40 bucks to go fishing off Key West today have no sense of what it used to be like. Had Loren not found the fish photos, there would be no images, no comparative record of what used to be a routine catch. In her paper, Loren says that the fishing charter tours are still very popular. The price of the tour hasn't dropped (adjusting for inflation), only the size of the fish. Looking at the photos, people now seem just as pleased to be champions as those "champs" back in the '50s, unaware that what's big now would have been thrown away then. Loren says she suspects that people just erase the past "and will continue to fish while marine ecosystems undergo extreme changes." Change Blindness Daniel Pauly, a professor at the University of British Columbia, has a way of describing these acts of creeping amnesia. He calls the condition "shifting baseline syndrome," and while he was talking about marine biologists' failure to see drastic changes in fish sizes over time, it's a bigger, deeper idea. When you're young, you look at the world and think what you see has been that way for a long time. When you're 5, everything feels "normal." When things change in your lifetime, you may regret what has changed, but for your children, born 30 years later into a more diminished world, what they see at 5 becomes their new "normal," and so, over time, "normal" is constantly being redefined to mean "less." And people who don't believe that the past was so different from the present might have what could be called "change blindness blindness." Because these changes happen slowly, over a human lifetime, they never startle. They just tiptoe silently along, helping us all adjust to a smaller, shrunken world. Professor Pauly has noticed that we are now consuming more small fish today than we did 50 years ago. Cod, swordfish and tuna are gradually giving way to herring, sardines, menhaden and anchovies. He was recently quoted as saying, "We are eating bait and moving on to jellyfish and plankton," and soon kids will be giving up tuna fish sandwiches for jellyfish sandwiches. Sounds crazy, I know, but then I happened to notice a story about the cannonball jellyfish (Stomolophus meleagris), found off Florida in the Gulf of Mexico. It is now being harvested for human consumption. U.S. fisheries have opened to catch those jellyfish, mostly to send off to Asia, but hey, I'm sure there's some marketing guy imagining peanut butter and jellyfish snacks. In fact — and I kid you not — at the Dallas aquarium, they are feeding real jellyfish peanut butter, and the jellies seem to like it. So already we've got jellies with just a hint of peanut living in Texas. Can the "New P & J" be far behind?
I imagine fairly common before public trash cans. I was guilty of littering while riding as a kid and doing so by example.
When environmentalists tell you that we have to save the environment but, these same fools support the Ukraine war and sending weapons to Ukraine? Yeah, prolonging the war will save the environment, got it! No, dumdums. Can you imagine how much pollutants and toxins have been released into the air since, February 24, 2022? Of course, the extreme liberal NWO globalists in the US and NATO never saw a war they did not like----as long as it lined their pockets with lots of cash. As for the environment, to hell with that! There is no cash in that for us.
I skimmed; same species? Fish are indeterminate growers. It makes sense that with increased predation (commercial or sport fishing), their size would be smaller. More appropriate would be to measure the size against the age of the animal to conclude environmental changes stunting growth. While a bummer, I'm not particularly sold on it being "terrible" if replacement population is keeping up. I was reading up on the redwood forests and having missed out on the largest sequoias that were fell to logging....if all those giants had been reforested, net negative would technically not have been that bad either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indet...e growth refers,, reptiles, and many molluscs.
Fair point, maybe replacement population is keeping up. One would have to look at the trends in and state of the world's fisheries to see if any more are going the way of, say, the Atlantic cod.