Determining the past, present and future health of wild fish in the ocean is the complex task that scientists at New England’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center face every day. As numerous outside reviews have revealed, this group is top notch, bringing the best available scientists and methods to bear on this challenging problem and embracing a well-developed system for external peer review of their work.

Trends in birth, growth and death of fish, and other ecological factors, are used to make the best possible determination of how many are in the ocean and how many can be caught by fishermen without harming the population. The job is complicated because the required data are difficult to collect and because fish live in a system in which many different kinds of animals interact. For example, herring are consumed by many larger species in addition to being a target of a commercial fishery.

Despite the high quality of New England’s world-renowned marine science, bashing the science is almost as popular as complaining about the weather. The fact is, anticipating the behavior of complex systems, whether marine or meteorological, is highly evolved, but ultimately imprecise.

Read the complete story from Talking Fish.