Quote:Calling the discovery 'staggering', Oceanus executive chairman Ng Cher Yew
Doesn't sound very hands-on for an executive chairman if he didn't at least occasionally check in on the abalones.
Quote:the group has since removed the former chief executive, Yu De Hua, from the company, stripped him of his role as a legal representative, and seized all company seals from him.
If Yu De Hua had no role in the poor feeding of the abalones, there should have been no need to kick him out. He should have been a valuable aide in helping to find a solution.
Instead he is being treated like he is part of the problem. Maybe there is a hint here.
Quote:We destroyed the seals and registered new seals in China
This seems rather extreme and would suggest a complete loss of trust in the former seal holder.
Quote:Though the experts expressed that this problem normally does not produce mortalities of the level recorded on our farms, their calculation of the empty shell volumes in the farms sampled could theoretically support the numbers
It would be interesting to know just what kind of mortalities are normally produced by poor feeding and poor breeding, and to understand just how large the deviation was in Oceanus' case. Abalone farming is not a new industry - there should be plenty of data from past case studies.
Without a 100% audit of the farms (note that only sampling was done) it will be hard to pinpoint the cause. But I think it is highly likely that many of the dead abalones never existed to begin with. That would also explain why Oceanus now requires all the shells to be kept for audit purposes (this means they did not do so before, so they don't have the shells to prove the dead abalones were ever there).
Try to conjure a mental picture of the 42m "missing presumed dead" abalones. We know that New Moon abalones for example are typically 425g net weight. But this is all meat which is only 1/3 of the abalone, offal and the shell form another 1/3 each. So the whole abalone in the shell could weigh 1.3kg. Let's assume that not all the abalones were market-ready, so the weighted average is only 100g each. So we estimate that 4.2m kg of abalones went missing.
How big a pile is 4.2m kg of something? Well, imagine your standard Olympic-size swimming pool. It's 50m long, 25m wide, and perhaps 1.5m deep on average. It holds 1,875 cubic metres of water. 1 cubic metre weighs 1 ton. So a swimming pool holds 1,875 tons of water. We are looking for 4.2m kg (4,200 tons) of abalones. That's enough to fill 2.5 Olympic-size swimming pools.
How fast can you steal that volume of abalones? It would take a while - you can't do it overnight. If you did it at night it would take many weeks, and many trips involving large trucks leaving tracks and making lots of noise. And if all the abalones died, how fast could you throw away the shells so they couldn't be found later? It would also take a while, and the rotting flesh would stink up the place pretty bad too in the meantime.
The common-sense conclusion, then, is that the abalones were not stolen, nor did they die and have their shells go missing. Rather, they were never there to begin with.
Of course, I have no proof either way. I am merely working from circumstantial evidence provided by the company itself - all this is public information, though of course the conclusion is my own.
As usual, YMMV.