End of Week 6 Blog

The most essential step in helping me care about lobsters was the readings that we did in week 1 about animal consciousness. When Peter Singer mentioned the ethical problems surrounding killing and digesting conscious beings I began to focus my research on animals that many people wouldn't even associate to have these coherent qualities. The use of Twitter and getting to see many posts related to animal ethics and conservation also prompted me to do more research on lobsters, but sea animals in general. Finally, What I think was the most significant building block exercise that I did was watching the Bird Brain documentary as I became more interested in learning how lobsters communicate and form social relationships. I thought that if birds are this smart who's to say or really even know if crustaceans can be as well.

I am mostly confident that I met the objectives in an effective way. I think if there is anything that I am not quite meeting or still need to work on its is probably something to do with the formatting or in proper citations as I have haven't written many essays in MLA. As for my writing, I think that my ideas are clear, concise, and display the data in an effective way that summarizes the research done on lobster communication, social behavior, and intelligence. Hopefully after the the peer reviews, I will better be able to understand any grammatical or unclear sentence mistakes that I have possibly made in my LR.

For the Social Media Campaign that we are going to be starting next week, I will be focusing on either issues related to the harmful practices of the fishing industry on lobster population or how climate change is negatively affecting the lobster population. I want to highlight these issues because in my research of lobster I have found that they are sentient beings and can feel pain. Therefore, I would like to know more about the conditions that the lobsters are exposed when they are caught and how they are treated. Humanly? I have seen pictures on Twitter of lobsters and other crustaceans being caught in large nets holding hundreds at a time. Based on this fact, I'm not certain that these condition are that great for the lobsters.

I similarly found through my research that global warming is negatively affective the population of lobsters, so I would like to learn more about how that will affect its role as a keystone species and what it will mean for fisheries on the east coast, where a large portion of their economy depends on a stable supply to sell. I have already learned that especially among young lobsters that the population is declining because of warming waters, which is causing the sea urchin population to increase. This is not good because lobsters role as a keystone species is to limit the population growth of these species. From the organizations that I have found so far, such as @crustaceansCompassion there are scientific breakthroughs regarding the sentience of Octopuses, lobsters, and crabs. This research that was reported by the organization, has led the British government to classify them as such and possibly make policy changes in the future giving them more protections.