Reimagining Wild Fisheries With the Whole Ecosystem in Mind

February 13, 2026 | Source: Foodprint | by Lela Nargi

In the past two decades, as Americans have been increasingly encouraged to eat more seafood for their health, a host of metrics to inform them about the sustainability of their purchases has also emerged. You can check a label to ensure your canned sardines were caught without injuring sea turtles; that the flounder for your filet from the fish counter was not harvested with a trawler; that pink shrimp from off the Oregon coast were caught with minimal damage to the surrounding ecosystem.

But despite these sorts of certifications, at least one-third of global fish stocks are now being harvested at unsustainable levels, in some cases threatening food security for humans and leading to “severe” impacts on ocean ecosystem functioning. There are a lot of reasons for these sorts of challenges: International supply chains are complex and often opaque, and illegal fishing still abounds in places; by some estimates, one in five fish are caught illegally. But fisheries management around the world also tends to prioritize an “approach that takes into account neither interactions among species nor impacts on habitat,” according to a 2024 paper in the Ocean Sustainability journal. Instead, it usually considers only one species of fish (tuna, for example), or one type of gear (trawls or dredges) or one desired outcome (preventing accidental entanglement of dolphins).

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