Fish harder; catch more?

Perhaps the most fundamental insight from fishery science is that ecosystems impose important and predictable constraints on food production from the sea. The familiar hump-shaped growth curve implies that the growth rate and carrying capacity of a species limit its production: Once stocks are depleted, further increasing fishing pressure will only lead to decreases in catch. This logic underpins fishery science and economics, nearly all fishery management legislation, and, most importantly, recent calls to restore fish stocks around the world (1). In PNAS, Cao et al. (2) propose a series of concrete steps for ecosystem and fishery restoration in the world’s superpower of fishing, China. Their call is couched within the complex, and often misunderstood, norms of Chinese culture, and appropriately distances itself from the western