"As a general rule, though there are dissidents, fisheries science is not so much an academic discipline as a branch of accountancy. It works on behalf of government and industry, and has many failures to its name: frequently setting higher catch rates – often with unjustified precision – than fish populations can sustain. Even so, governments ... routinely set quotas higher than the scientists recommend. Then they fail to enforce the rules, ensuring that even more fish than they allow are taken. Then everyone wonders why fish populations collapse. Sorry, not populations, "stocks". Fish, in this schema, exist only to be exploited."