Doomsday will come to fishes across the world's oceans by 2048. That was the startling implication of findings published in 2006 by marine ecologist Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, and several colleagues. The projection was merely a side note in a paper in Science about the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem services in the oceans, which concluded that the world's oceans were in bad shape, in part because of overfishing. Then, in the next-to-last paragraph, the authors extrapolated from the percentage of fisheries that have already collapsed and predicted that in 32 years no more fish would be caught in the ocean. That point, not their larger conclusions on the role of biodiversity in ecosystem functions, was highlighted in press releases and then garnered headlines around the world.
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