Three thousand feet under the sea, a mother orange roughy sheds her very first eggs above an ancient soft coral garden. She is 73 years in age. These fish are exceptionally slow to mature, but she may live for centuries—the rare black corals she swims among live for millenia. Suddenly, a titanic trawl net comes tearing across the seamount, scattering her delicate eggs into the frigid current. She swims for her life, but the net’s mouth is wider than the wings of a passenger jet. She is crushed against the bodies of her entire school. Her organs explode from rapid pressure change as fishermen drag her to the surface, at which point she is dismembered, freeze-wrapped in plastic packaging, and stamped as “sustainable seafood.”

This is a true story—a fate befalling countless thousands of roughies every year. These deep sea sages can be purchased in supermarkets and restaurants around the world, most of the time accompanied by the blue checkmark logo of the Marine Stewardship Council, the world’s largest and most influential seafood certification whose label adorns tuna, salmon fillets, crab legs, and sea life of all varieties on the shelves of a grocer near you.

When a consumer hears of sustainable fishing, they might imagine a hand-woven net, an artisanal canoe, a community fish merchant. But when we scientists use that term, that’s not what it means at all. With respect to fisheries, “sustainable” has a very explicit definition, which comes from an over-simplistic and widely discredited population modeling formula that disguises a scorched-earth political ideology which aims to halve the world’s fish populations—and insist that our marine ecosystems can be sustained in this devastated state.

In 1947, a United States military fisherman named Wilbert Chapman published a State Department bulletin that applied a colonial logging theory to fish populations. In it, he sketched a fake model with “no data, no equations, and no results of observations, experiments or modeling,” which he used to argue that fishing regulations should be designed to enable the extraction of as much marine life as possible from the ocean over time: the “maximum sustainable yield” (MSY). He labeled animals left swimming free in the ocean as “waste.” While the MSY doctrine rapidly proliferated in international politics, it was a distortion of ecology designed to financialize our relationship with the ocean, euphemistically turning sea life extraction into “yield” and reducing wild fish populations to “stocks.”

Chapman’s Fake Model (U.S. State Department, 1949)

The maximum sustainable yield model posits that for a given population, a balance exists between reproducing individuals and external limiting factors where maximum population growth—and, conveniently, maximum profitability—will occur. This theoretically occurs at 50 percent of a given population’s historic baseline. In other words, under this paradigm, sustainability means to cut the population in half. When the population becomes depleted by more than 60 percent, the United Nations defines this as overfishing.

Yet many fisheries ministries, notably the United States National Marine Fisheries Service, or NOAA Fisheries, lower this 60 percent bar further yet, allowing fish populations to plummet by 75 percent or even lower before classifying the population as overfished—meanwhile a population depleted by less than 40 percent is targeted as “underfished.” Thus, when the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reports that two-thirds of “fish stocks [are] within biologically sustainable levels,” this definition of sustainability is effectively being used to obscure the bare truth, which is that nearly 90 percent of monitored fish populations have been depleted by at least 40 percent and over a third of them by 60 percent or more—and these are optimistic assessments.

Of course, the decimation of fish populations sends shockwaves through the food web, depleting prey for predators like seals and whales, depriving habitats of critical ecological actors, and undermining the biological “carbon pump” from the atmosphere to the ocean, which helps to stabilize our climate. Marine policy that attempts to take these consequences into consideration is called “ecosystem-based management,” but the MSY policy waves away all these complicating ecological factors, instead modeling and managing each species in isolation.

Since the MSY model was institutionalized over 70 years ago, its central assumptions—that fisheries scientists can accurately estimate the size, structure, and growth of fish populations; that the fishing industry can be trusted or monitored to truthfully report catches; that governments can adequately regulate them; and that fish populations can be predictively modeled in isolation from their ecosystems—have not panned out. While theoretically setting guardrails against overfishing, management to achieve MSY has not abated the relentless increase in global fishing activity. It has not prevented catastrophic collapses of targeted fish populations. It has not overseen their recovery. Even in waters of the United States, which claims to operate the “best managed marine fisheries in the world,” enormous assemblages of marine life such as the great schools of Atlantic cod and mass migrations of Arctic crabs have been effectively wiped out.

While maximum sustainable yield still holds purchase in academia, many renowned scientists have criticized this paradigm since its inception. After roughly a quarter century of MSY being put into practice, fisheries scientist Peter Larkin declared the doctrine dead in his now infamous 1977 “Epitaph to MSY.” Another quarter century onward, Sidney Holt, the legendary whale advocate and cofounder of fisheries science, spurned MSY as a “pseudo-science with little empirical or sound theoretical basis” that “enthrones and institutionalizes greed.” In more recent years, environmental historians such as Carmel Finley, Naomi Oreskes, and Aaron van Neste would further detail how this “policy disguised as science” was used to serve military interests and silence scientific dissent.

Major conservation bodies have also rejected the maximum sustainable yield doctrine. As early as 1975, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) declared that “Maximum Sustainable Yield and other single species management concepts are not adequate as a basis for management of wild living resources,” and in 1999, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species concurred that “biological reference points commonly used in fisheries management, such as the biomass corresponding to the maximum sustainable yield […] are not readily related to the quantitative guidelines provided under [international agreement].”

Yet international treaties, regional fisheries management organizations, and nation-states continue to center pursuit of this mythical maximum sustainable yield above all else in marine policy. This puts governments at fundamental odds with the goal of mitigating extinction, which industry-aligned groups like the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation explicitly acknowledge, explaining that “a 50% drop in population size from the maximum can be reasonable from a fisheries management viewpoint, but [can] still result in a threatened classification by [international standards].” Of course, it would be obscene for a biologist to address an international body with a proposal to kill the maximum possible individuals of a threatened bird or mammal species, yet this is commonplace for marine life.

And this concept of sustainable fishing isn’t just useful in politics—it’s incredible marketing. As scientists and journalists continue to raise alarms about the ecological toll of commercial fishing, assuaging consumers’ concerns has become a business in itself. Today, even enormous grocery chains like Whole Foods and Walmart pledge sustainable seafood policies. At the same time, while their leading certifier, the Marine Stewardship Council, plasters its promotional materials with images of small-scale subsistence fishers, what they don’t tell shoppers is that approximately 93 percent of certified seafood comes from “large-scale” industrial fisheries. Such practices involve the use of vessels exceeding 40 feet or towed fishing gear such as trawls and dredges, which alone haul in around two thirds of MSC-certified catch. In 2024, the MSC reported raking in the equivalent of over $42 million—93 percent of it from licensing fees paid by seafood companies to use the logo. Inevitably, this “pay-to-play” income structure incentivizes the MSC to certify an increasing volume of seafood year-over-year, exploding from just a few fisheries in 2000 to nearly 17 percent of the global catch in 2024, which has resulted in a tripling of its income between 2009 and 2018. And of course, as some species become depleted, fisheries shift to new targets in an endless cycle of fishing down the food web, subjecting ever more ocean life to commercial extraction and pushing our planet to a breaking point.

Challenging this convention may seem impossible, but there was a time when whales were managed for maximum extraction as well. Today whaling is widely abhorred, but throughout the 20th century, humans killed nearly three million of these gentle giants to burn the oil in their fat tissue. In just 100 years, as many as two thirds of sperm whales and 90 percent of the blue whales on the planet were harpooned and dragged from the ocean. The carnage continued until 1982, when the International Whaling Commission (IWC) passed a total prohibition on commercial hunting of whales. Yet the IWC was no radical anti-whaling conference. It was founded in 1946 upon a convention postulating, “if whaling is properly regulated […] increases in the size of whale stocks will permit increases in the number of whales which may be captured.” In other words, the IWC’s foundational rationale for regulating whaling was to kill as many whales as possible in the long term—the same way that we manage fish today.

It wasn’t until 1971, when biologists Roger Payne and Scott McVay revealed to the world the songs of humpback whales, that a global paradigm shift was set in motion. The scientists pressed the whale songs onto vinyl, releasing a record that would eventually spend eight weeks on the Billboard chart and become the soundtrack and the slogan (“save the whales”) to a new wave of the environmental movement. Scientists from around the world stood up at the IWC in defiance of the reduction of whales to mere resources to be slaughtered and commodified for profit. By this struggle, the great whales were saved… for a time.

Today, the great whale recovery enabled by the IWC moratorium is beginning to backslide. Nations that ignore the agreement are reinforcing their fleets and issuing permits to kill endangered fin whales. Yet a far greater threat to whales is fishing. The most endangered great whale on Earth, the North Atlantic Right, is being driven toward extinction because it is drowning in lobster trapping ropes. Even the magnificent blue whales are once again under threat, this time by industrial seine fleets, which relentlessly pursue them to snatch the krill from before their mouths. Nearly half a million tonnes per year of krill are captured. These captured krill are used primarily to feed fish species that are farmed because we can no longer catch them from the ocean at the scale demanded. Whales go hungry from lack of krill, as do people who fish to survive, while the seafood industry tells us it’s feeding the world.

In this era of planetary extinction, the pseudoscience of sustainable fishing has reached a legitimation crisis. Government agencies that direct industries to pursue maximal wildlife extraction cannot reasonably be considered regulators. The world urgently needs a revolution in marine policy which aims to minimize the threats to imperiled marine life, just as we strive to do for life on land. While policymakers must respect the sovereignty of Indigenous fishing communities and rights of fishing industry workers, they should have no obligation to help maintain the revenues of fishing corporations and seafood distributors, which do not feed the world as much as siphon nutrients to rich nations from poorer ones. As long as they perpetuate this discredited “zombie doctrine,” academics and policymakers are misleading the public into believing that fisheries are more regulated and marine ecosystems are more resilient than they actually are. Maximum sustainable yield is a specious and capitalistic concept that has no place in modern science and is unfit to inform the global system of marine management.

Sustainable fishing is a deception, a myth motivated by the ideology that life on Earth belongs to humankind. As we now begin to understand the incredible cognition of fishes—who dote on their young, craft works of art for their mates, and recognize the faces of one another, themselves, and even humans—it is long since time to rediscover and respect fish as wildlife with whom we share this blue world.