Wild-caught shrimp welfare interventions
- commitment
- 6 hrs/week
- flexibility
- No mentee proposal
The project
This project would support the wild-caught scoping team at SWP in our work of identifying and investigating potential interventions to help the ~22 trillion shrimps that are caught from the wild each year (making them by far the animals killed most numerously for food by humans). This involves exploring ideas in both the industrial shrimp trawling industry and small-scale shrimp fisheries, building on our prior research carried out in the last months. The project will be research-heavy, but with potential for operations and communications tasks.
The mentee's role
Mentees would support us in scoping interventions to improve the welfare of wild-caught shrimps. This could include (tasks will be chosen by mentees):
- Looking deeply into topics of interest or specific questions, then compiling the results
- Obtaining relevant data from agencies and analysing it
- Assisting with the commissioning to gather welfare-relevant data and footage
- Identifying relevant people and organisations and drafting outreach messages
- Making recommendations on potential interventions to research further
- Assisting with writing, providing input, and editing documents
- Coming up with own ideas for how to advance the work and carrying them out after discussing
Mentees will have a degree of autonomy over the direction of the tasks.
Who I'm looking for
- General scout mindset and research ability, including epistemic humility and willingness to pivot
- Care for achieving the highest expected impact for shrimps
- Comprehensible and transparent reasoning
- Independence and ability to ask for help when necessary, knowing their own limits
- High conscientiousness and being able to follow through
- Ability to focus on the mission without getting lost in irrelevant details
- Proficiency in using LLMs for research paired with healthy scepticism and ability to think and write independently
Questions for applicants
- Point out at least one relevant skill or trait you think you're especially good at compared to the median applicant, and at least one skill or trait in which you expect to be weaker than the median applicant.
- What do you hope to gain from this project?
Please keep your answers concise. We strongly prefer human-written responses.
Support offered
- Regular check-ins and accountability
- Giving direction, feedback and suggestions
- Providing resources and potentially connections within and beyond SWP
- Friendly, non-judgemental vibe focused on mutual benefit
- format
- Research & writing · Project scoping
- topic
- Wild animal welfare · Neglected animal groups
Jan Gaida
I work as Wild-caught Scoping Lead at Shrimp Welfare Project, trying to understand global shrimp fishery and develop interventions to improve the welfare of the individuals after capture. Previously, I got a Master's degree in physics (specialising in astrophysics). I am interested in farmed & wild animal welfare, Wikipedia, forecasting, prioritisation research, and suffering reduction.