Ransom A. Myers, a former government scientist who tried in vain to warn that overfishing would lead to the collapse of Atlantic cod populations and later discovered that 90% of the world's bluefin tuna and other large predatory fish have disappeared, has died. He was 54.
Myers died Tuesday in Halifax, Nova Scotia, of complications of brain cancer, according to colleagues at Dalhousie University, where Myers was a professor of ocean studies. He was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor in November and spent his final months in the hospital able to speak only a few words.
Myers, who went by the nickname RAM, was a gifted mathematician and biologist who shook up the insular world of fisheries science with blunt statements about how various species of sharks, turtles and fish were headed toward extinction if industrial fishing didn't retreat from excessive hunting.
"Humans have always been very good at killing big animals," Myers said. "Ten thousand years ago, with just some pointed sticks, humans managed to wipe out the woolly mammoth, saber-toothed tigers, mastodons and giant vampire bats. The same could happen in the oceans."
Such bold pronouncements didn't spring from preconceived ideology, but rather from patterns he discerned from fishing records, scientific surveys and other data he collected from all over the world.
Myers had a unique ability to look at complex global changes and pick out trends that others had missed, said Boris Worm, a colleague at Dalhousie in Halifax. "Unlike most scientists who look at a snippet of reality, he believed we are facing global problems that need to be analyzed on a global scale and communicated on a global scale," Worm said.
With the help of Worm, Myers spent years poring over five decades of Japanese log books and other fishing records to determine that 90% of the world's sharks, tuna, swordfish, cod and other big predatory fish had been serially stripped from the seas by industrialized fishing since the early 1950s.
The result, published in 2003 in the scientific journal Nature, was front-page news around the world. It stirred scientific debate that continues, even though a review panel of the National Academy of Sciences has upheld its conclusions.
"We confirmed that the pattern was right," said Andy Rosenberg, a panel member and longtime colleague now at the University of New Hampshire. "Most people criticizing the methodology didn't like the answer."
