Papa can you hear us?

Ernest Hemingway was a man who liked big fish. Now, Paul Greenberg has gone through the trouble of doing the math to estimate just how many fish Papa Hemingway killed, and what that might mean in terms of today's dwindling stocks of tunas, marlins, and sharks. His answer: Hemingway's ardent fishing in the 1930s-1960s resulted in 78,000 fewer blue marlin and 18,000 fewer bluefin tuna today. Which is quite a lot, especially for bluefin tuna, as that's about 60% of the current total stock of bluefin tuna in the Western Atlantic.

Would that they knew then what we know now, you might say, and we hear that alot in the fisheries world. Today, sportfishermen release their marlins and many don't target tuna at all anymore. As the rest of the news is filled with talk of the collapse of subprime mortgage loans and the slipping stock market, remember that the laws of compound interest apply to the sea, too. Two big fish left in the water today add up to thousands of baby fish in the future.