Vegans vs. The Omnivores~ Survival

It's about initial start-up costs. Once the traps are properly constructed, they take very little effort to maintain - our trout box, for example, was basically a box that you put in a stream underneath a small waterfall. When fish fall in, the biggest ones can't swim out. Put it in a stream with fish for a few hours a day and you get a fish stuck in it. It would be important to watch out for over-catching, so as not to deplete the population, though.

You can do the same thing with man-made tidepools - build a big enclosure right at the waterline, out of rocks, and when the tide is high, lots of little things get swept in. Low tide comes, they can't get out, you harvest.

The important part - as it pertains to this discussion - is that the omnivores have these sources of protien and high-calorie food to live on while they are harvesting food and gathering food and nuts. They have everything available to the vegans, plus other advantages. But, as I said earlier, I don't think the vegans are screwed, as long as they are inventive.

Cycloptichorn

Farming beans/wheat etc is brutally hard work in my opinion. So many stages and all labour intensive. Harvesting is horrid work (I think that's why the hunters were men - it's the physically easier side of the hunting/gathering equation).

I don't like picking berries - it either means back pain from stooping/crouching for long periods of time, or bug bites, or thorn scratches. I'm not experienced with harvesting nuts so can't comment on that piece of it.

I'd rather fish than do anything related to farming/harvesting.

I don't think you're going to have blackberry thickets on this island. You'd need someone knowledgeable to avoid eating what ya shouldn't oughta eat.

That's what the pigs are for!

Ooh, maybe the Vegans wouldn't be down with experimenting on them like that.

Cycloptichorn

Pigs will rarely eat what they shouldn't eat. You could just follow them around. The first time my friends and i went looking for jimson weed, we just went to a large hog lot in an open meadow. Everything else was gone, only the jimson remained.

Pigs won't help ya with the fish, though.

Huh - what did you guys use that for? Ingest recreationally? Dangerous! I used to know how to make a poisonous tincture out of it, but that's about it.

Cycloptichorn

Naw, you wait 'til the seed pods dry out and open, then collect the seeds. It's like a mild amphetamine. We'd take a pinch of seeds (15 or 20, they're tiny), and it was better than a cup of coffee. We had no truck with the leaves and stems. The plant contains atropine and scopalamine. We'd also sometimes sprinkle the seeds on a pipe load of weed. Certainly something to be careful of.

But don't forget to find a conch shell. Gotta have a conch shell to use as a trumpet.

and conch makes good eating too - even raw. When I was in the Bahamas - the lifeguard told me how he loved to eat conch raw. So when I went snorkeling nearby I spied a big old conch shell in the ocean. I dove down retreived it and brought my big catch to the local lifeguard. He showed me how to crack it open with a big rock, rub it in the sand to clean it and then wash it off in the surf. Then he took a big bite and I did as well. My friend wanted nothing to do with it.

See I have survival skills.

I learned to make traps in PE, along with snow glasses, lean-tos, and other survival stuff in school. I realize this isn't an everyday thing in most schools, but in Alberta there are many families who make their living off traps, or at least supplement their income and freezers. No vegertarian would survive on their own in the Canadian north for one year without an awful lot of supplies.
The traps I learned were relatively easy to make, mostly twigs and string. Trap lines aren't set up willy nilly either. Animals have paths and you can see them in the grass. Rabbits are probably the easiest, but not many rabbits live (naturally) in the tropics.

Don't need traps to catch conch - they don't move too fast - I suspect because the shells are so heavy.

I learned how to make conch ceviche in Belize. It's was delicious. My husband had the same reaction as your friend. It's pretty alien looking out of it's shell. Met a guy who free dove for lobster too. I don't have the lungs for it unfortunately.

When I was 10 years old, I got a sliver from a Salmonberry thicket in my thumb. After the infection, pain and the resulting expansion of said digit... the nail has bed never returned to normal.

Depending where it is - you don't have to dive that far. I caught that sucker just off the beach - I can't dive that deep and I could see it easily from the surface.

The lobster, not the conch... The lobsters are over 60 ft. deep. These guys freedive and pick them off the ocean side of the reef. I don't have the breath or the stomach for the pain in me ears, I'd no doubt encounter that far under the deep.

maybe one of the other omnivores could - that would be awesome lobster and conch - those vegans wouldn't know what they were missing.

I think the omni-s would make first use of the ocean and tidepools.
We know they all can swim.
Clams and lobsters and the aforementioned conch are all edible right out the water. You can steam those babies under seaweed and have yourself a clambake every night.
(There's a quote on a restaurant wall on Cape Cod wherein the Pilgrim fathers and mothers were complaining at having to subsist on 'nothing but lobsters nightly' heh)
All you need to catch crabs is a bit of string, some clam meat and good timing.
~
Once the guts are out, most fish can be eaten from gills to tail fin. (There's a passage in the story of the Essex where the starving shipwrecked sailors (they were stove in by a whale) reach Henderson Island and when two men saw a fish in a tide-pool, they dove in, snatched it up and "ate it bones, liver, lights and all."

Not recommended as the acids in a fish stomach are very efficient dis-solvers of flesh.

They also ate peppergrass that they found, so that would help out the vegans.

Joe(If any were left.)Nation

Essex, that's a good one. The inspiration for Moby Dick, and undoubted cannibalism. The real whale, Mocha Dick, apparently survived the first attempt to harpoon him. After that, although he was docile if left alone, he would attack if he were attacked. He was finally killed about 20 years after the Essex incident when he went to the aid of a cow whose calf was harpooned. Witnesses said that if he was angry, he would sometimes breach so fast and violently that his entire body would leave the water. Most whalers in that region of the Pacific would steer clear if they thought they saw a white whale.

When the men in Bounty's launch reached the Great Barrier Reef, they ate any shellfish they found raw. They lit a fire with some drift wood on one island, but it apparently attacted the attention of some aborigines on shore, and after their experience in the "Friendly" Islands, they wanted nothing to do with savages.