Related thread here.

Given your (partial) success in court (reported here and here), have your plans changed for what you'd use extra funding for? And has the funding gap changed? Your post says:

We will now explore bringing private prosecutions against mega-farms that use Frankenchickens.

I could imagine that a higher human population could induce demand for agriculture and increased trash output which could increase terrestrial invertebrate populations.

So this would be more food/net primary productivity available for terrestrial invertebrates to eat, and agriculture would have to increase net primary productivity overall (EDIT: or transform it into a more useful form for invertebrates), right?

My best guess is that more humans reduces wild terrestrial invertebrate populations in the near term / on Earth (so ignoring space colonization), largely through agricultural land use.^[1] If you think:

1. these wild invertebrates or even just wild insects matter a decent amount, say about as much as RP does/would (interpolating their estimates), and
2. they have lives worth preventing, because you're suffering-focused or just think they have net negative lives, say, due to their high fertility and mortality rates,

then increasing human populations could be good for animals in the near term, with the effect on wild animals outweighing those on farmed animals.

It's unclear to me what's going on with wild aquatic animals.

1. ^{^}

   See especially Tables 3 and 4 from Attwood et al., 2008.
   Net primary productivity is also typically lower in crops, across crops, based on "Land Use Change" greenhouse gas emissions from OWID / Poore & Nemecek, 2018.
   Gross primary productivity decreases when replacing forest with crops, but increases if replacing grassland with crops, according to the globally representative study Krause et al., 2022.
   Some other studies support increased and others decreased net productivity in crops compared to nature (Tomasik, 2013–2022, a, b)
   But pesticides and fertilizers also plausibly reduce arthropod populations based on my lit reviews (but less clear in the long run with repeated use), so even if primary productivity increased, arthropod populations could still be lower overall.

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:

Early larval growth and mortality of anchoveta is highly variable at intra-seasonal and latitudinal scales along the Chilean coast. In northern Chile (23 °S), larval growth varies between 0.50- and 0.85-mm day−1, with daily losses of 16–23% (Contreras et al., 2017); meanwhile, in central Chile (36 °S), larvae grew at 0.40-0.57 mm day−1, with daily losses of 4–7% (Castro and Hernández, 2000; Hernández and Castro, 2000).

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.

We’re facing a funding gap of £236k this year and seek long-term funding to continue our work and give us greater financial stability.

Any updates on this since this was posted?

How much room for more funding do you expect to have in general for work in 2025 (after including funding coming from ACE)?

1. I'm clueless about the sign of the effects on wild aquatic animals (based on this project), and the effects on wild aquatic animals could be more important than the effects on farmed aquatic animals.
2. Reductions in animal agriculture, including aquaculture, have a high risk of backfiring overall, in case they're bad for wild terrestrial arthropods. In particular, animal agriculture, including aquaculture, tends to decrease wild terrestrial arthropod populations through land use (for crops and/or pasture), and possibly substantially (Attwood et al., 2008, Tables 3 and 4), so reducing animal agriculture in general can increase wild terrestrial arthropod suffering by increasing their populations.
3. Aquaculture tends to have smaller effects on wild terrestrial arthropods than land vertebrate farming due to lower land use per kg of output/protein, and a targeted reduction of aquaculture — and not a broader reduction across animal agriculture in general — will, via substitution effects, shift some animal production towards land vertebrate farming and increase fishing pressure (and have highly uncertain net effects on wild aquatic animals, but actual wild capture production could go up or down overall [1][2]). This could reduce or even flip the wild terrestrial animal effects in 3.
4. Based on my own unpublished calculations, the targeted reduction of shrimp farming in particular seems good for farmed animals + wild terrestrial animals together (if you think wild arthropods have bad or ~neutral lives in expectation, and your moral weights for shrimp are high enough), although still highly uncertain for wild aquatic animals. However, my calculations need more review.
5. Not a backfire effect, but work to reduce aquaculture seems to reduce insect and brine shrimp farming in expectation, and this would, on my view, count in its favour. I don't know if these effects or the effects on wild animals would be more important, because I haven't really looked into it enough.

Even the best counterexample to (a theoretical version of) IIT consists in building a simple system with a high measure of “integrated information”: I entirely agree with that line of attack, that is fatal both for large monotonous matrices and tiny shrimp brains. 

How does this argument apply to shrimp?