Faith-based science, and all that fish

摘要

One of the world's leading fisheries scientists is taking on Dalhousie University's Boris Worm - the superstar ecologist who suggested in late 2006 that the world's major fish stocks could collapse by 2048. Ray Hilborn told me that Worm and his co-authors erred in their Science article by using fish catches as an indicator of resource collapse: "The idea of using catch data to reflect trends in stock abundance is terribly flawed," he said. A professor of fisheries management at the University of Washington in Seattle, Hilborn is the lead author of several research papers - including one written under the magisterial title 'State of the World's Fisheries'.