April 9, 2020 — If you find it hard to imagine a college professor (of a subject other than epidemiology) drawing a crowd nowadays, I’m with you. Yet that is exactly what fisheries scientist Ray Hilborn did April 2.

To a sit-in-your-office, stare-at-your-monitor webinar, no less!

It’s conceivable that the size of the audience reflected a degree of covid-19-inspired restlessness. But ennui alone cannot explain the more than 450 people who signed up for Hilborn’s presentation on the status of fish stocks and the role of management. And rather than dwindle, as webinar audiences tend to do, by the time the session ended Hilborn’s audience had swollen to “an easy 600,” according to NOAA’s Tracy Gill, who coordinated the event.

To be fair, Hilborn was no stranger to his audience. A professor of aquatic and fishery science at the University of Washington, he’s written several books, including, most recently, “Ocean Recovery: A Sustainable Future for Global Fisheries” (co-authored by his wife, Ulrike Hilborn) as well as scores of peer-reviewed papers, and is respected by industry, academics, and NGOs.

His message Thursday was reassuring – more or less. Listen to scientists long enough, and you realize that you can get yourself into trouble reading between the lines.

Many of you, for example, will recall how in 2006, mainstream journalists leveraged a study led by the Canadian ecologist Boris Worm on the loss of biodiversity in ocean ecosystems services into the disappearance of fish by 2048. “One very small part of the paper,” Hilborn recalled, extrapolated from catch trends and came up with a downward curve that “hit the y axis,” in the professor’s words, at 100 percent collapsed in 2048.

Read the full story at National Fisherman