A new strategy to selectively spare pregnant females has brought the Chesapeake Bay crab population back from a precipitous collapse in just 3 years.

In 2003, a geneticist used DNA markers called microsatellites to show that a fishing vessel had violated its quota by catching too many cod from the North Sea. It was a rare victory against the massive problem of illegal fishing. For technical reasons, however, microsatellite tests for identifying the local origins of caught fish haven't been widely adopted.

Home to pristine reefs, rare sharks and vast numbers of exotic fish, the Coral Sea is a unique haven of biodiversity off the northeastern coast of Australia. If a proposal by the Australian government goes ahead, the region will also become the world’s largest marine protected area, with restrictions or bans on fishing, mining and aquaculture.

Sustainably managing ecosystems is challenging, especially for complex systems such as coral reefs. This study develops critical reference points for sustainable management by using a large empirical dataset on the coral reefs of the western Indian Ocean to investigate associations between levels of target fish biomass (as an indicator of fishing intensity) and eight metrics of ecosystem state. These eight ecological metrics each exhibited specific thresholds along a continuum of fishable biomass ranging from heavily fished sites to old fisheries closures.