COUNTING FISH A management approach based on chaos theory could help prevent collapses of sardines (shown) and other valuable fishes.
© Ralph A. Clevenger/CORBIS
There’s something fishy going on with Pacific sardines. The pint-size swimmers, whose abundance sustained California’s famed Cannery Row for decades, all but disappeared from coastal waters in the 1950s. Numbers remained low until the late 1980s, when enough fish finally reappeared to make commercial harvesting worthwhile again.