It is possible to prevent the collapse of commercial fish stocks

BORIS WORM, a marine biologist, has spent much of his academic life studying fish. In 2006 he came to the depressing conclusion that by 2048 the world’s commercial fisheries would have collapsed. Fish would no longer be on the menu. But Dr Worm is no pessimist and on July 31st he published a more encouraging piece of work in Science. It suggests that, with proper management, it ought to be possible to rebuild the world’s fisheries.

Dr Worm, who works at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada, conducted the study in collaboration with Ray Hilborn of the University of Washington, Seattle, who was a ferocious critic of his initial analysis. For two years the pair, along with 19 colleagues, gathered data from ten of the world’s large fisheries. They found a mixed picture, in which some species were overfished in some places and not in others. …