Comment on ‘Impacts of biodiversity loss on ocean ecosystem services’. Science 316: 1285; author reply 1285

Worm et al. (Research Articles, 3 November 2006, p. 787) used a power relation to predict a global collapse of fisheries by the year 2048. However, a linear regression of the data for the past 40 years yields an excellent fit, with a predicted date of collapse of 2114. Thus, long-term projections of fisheries collapse are highly dependent on the specific statistical model used. In their recent paper, Worm et al. (1) predicted“the global collapse of all taxa currentlyfished by the mid–21st century (based on the extrapolation of regression in Fig. 3A to 100 % in the year 2048), ” a date that has since received considerable media attention. The re-gression shown in this figure is a best-fit power relation, which indicates an acceleration in the rate of species collapse. However, examination of the percentage of collapsed taxa by year in figure 3A in (1) reveals a substantial mismatch between predicted and observed values over the past 30 years. Specifically, all of the data point