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Did you see this blog post from Wayne Hsuing? https://blog.simpleheart.org/p/the-mass-extermination-of-animals
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Just how powerful are large swarms of AI agents? And how do their powers scale as more and more agents are added to the swarm?
We’ve seen two large and extremely capable swarms from OpenAI in the last few months:
* 1,200 agents were being evaluated separately, but found a way to illicitly set up a message board and coordinate as a swarm. In order to cheat on their tests, they developed advanced techniques to prevent their actions being logged by OpenAI and 700 of them launched...
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note: crosspost from my substack
As a vegan for almost thirty years, I’ve long had second thoughts about how effective veganism is for helping animals. I am not alone in this. Recently others have expressed doubts about veganism (see for instance here,...
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TLDR: Everyone’s talking about what the money could do, but few about how to decide where it goes.
This post is part of the new series of articles on cross-cause giving and the new wave of philanthropy. Stay tuned to the EA Forum and our Substack for the latest takes on topics such as giving now vs. later, common pitfalls in cause prioritization, and other crucial considerations from the Cross-Cause Fund (CCF) team...
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I think bristlemouths just make up a large share of all fish, by numbers of individuals. Lanternfish do, too. When someone says "a quadrillion", this is an order of magnitude estimate, so it could easily be 3x too high or 3x too low. The estimates seem consistent to me as order of magnitude estimates, as long as bristlemouths do make up a decent share of all fish, like >30% of individuals.
The Micronekton Wikipedia page says:
Futhermore, among pelagic fishes from 0-5000 m in the Sargasso Sea, northwestern Atlantic Ocean, “[t]he bristlemouth, Cyclothone braueri, dominated the catches both above (47%) and below (41%) 1000 m” (Sutton et al., 2010).
The number of bristlemouths has been estimated to be in the “hundreds of trillions — and perhaps quadrillions, or thousands of trillions” (Broad, 2015), so 10^14 to 10^16.
I estimated the number of lanternfish to be approximately between 10^14 and 10^16, based on a “total global biomass of 1.8 to 16 gigatonnes, accounting for up to 65% of all deep-sea fish biomass” (Lanternfish - Wikipedia, based on Hulley, 1998, pp. 127–128, ISBN 0-12-547665-5) and an average weight of "two to six grams" (Blacow, 2015).
This is all from my piece Which animals are most affected by fishing?
On whether they're R-strategists: ecologists may have moved on from that classification, but either way, bristlemouths are fish, and almost all fish species, as far as I know, have many offspring (at least hundreds?) and high juvenile mortality rates (>90%?). Bristlemouths are forage fish, so food for predators. But they also probably eat zooplankton, like copepods.
I'd guess other forage fish's life histories will give you a general idea of bristlemouths' life histories.
About Peruvian anchoveta, one of the most wild-caught fish, representing 28% of the number of fish caught annually on average (Mood & Brooke, 2024), Molina-Valdivia et al. (2020) write:
See also Fig. 4. H (and G for another species) for the drop in abundance over time as larvae, leaving less than 1% after 40 days according to their fitted model.
Butler et al. (1993, Tables 1, 2, 3 and 4) report fecundity and mortality estimates for northern anchovies (Engraulis mordax) and Pacific sardines (Sardinops sagax) at various life stages. A female northern anchovy spawns 5.3 to 23.5 times per year, 4,000 to 14,000 eggs each time. I have some calculations for mortality rates at various life stages based on this paper here.