For some time now, we’ve been keeping an eye on the alarmist anti-fishing documentary, The End of the Line (EOTL). British journalist Charles Clover, who wrote the book of the same name back that was published in 2006 is the man behind the curtain on this one. Released earlier this year, the film, narrated by former Cheers star turned Oceana activist (in his copious spare time) Ted Danson, has attracted scant attention and mixed reviews. One of the film’s central themes is that all the fish in the sea will be gone by 2048, a statistic thatas we all now know– has been debunked by the researcher who had originally made the claim. The researcher is Boris Worm of Dalhousie University. Back in 2006, he published a study that got a lot of attention where he claimed that the world’s oceans would run out of seafood by 2048. But along with that attention, Worm drew a lot of criticism from fisheries scientists and even environmentalists who thought his conclusions were alarmist and based more on ideology than facts. A little more than a month ago, Worm and 19 other researchers, including one of Worm’s toughest critics, Ray Hilborn, put out a far more optimistic assessment of the situation:

Two years after a study warned that overfishing could cause a collapse in the world’s seafood stocks by 2048, an update says the tide is turning, at least in some areas. “This paper shows that our oceans are not a lost cause,” said Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, lead author of both reports. “I’m somewhat more hopeful … than what we were seeing two years ago.” It’s personal as well as scientific. “I have actually given thought to whether I will be hosting a seafood party then,” Worm said, meaning 2048.

Apparently, news of the more optimistic view has yet to reach Mr. Clover, who continues to use the 2048 date in order to promote his film. The following is from an interview Clover gave to The Huffington Post:

LM: One of End of the Line’s most shocking claims was that if we continue fishing the way we do now, we would see the end of most seafood by 2048. How did conditions become so dire without prior media coverage?

CC: It’s been in the scientific publications. It’s been in Science and Nature. The reason is, it was told late. It was only told in 2001 that the world catches had peaked around 1989 and were going down because the Chinese had been overstating their data. The Chinese government overstated world fish catches, and there is a probability that they also overstated the farmed fish that they harvest. So the assumption that we should just progress seamlessly from wild fish to farmed fish is probably wrong. We probably need the oceans to produce our fish for the foreseeable future, and the reality of farmed fish in the west is that it’s produced from wild carnivorous fish. You haven’t closed the circles as far as a sustainable system is concerned if you’re still unsustainably harvesting small fish to feed farmed fish, and that’s what I find most disturbing. That five pounds of wild fish to make one pound of farmed fish conversion rate is a new figure and came out of one of the world’s top aquaculture expertsand it’s far worse than anybody thought. If it takes five pounds of Peruvian anchoveta to make one pound of farmed salmon it makes you wonder for a whole host of reasons, both developmentalare we taking away from poor people in the developing worldand also ecological and wasteful, of whether we should be eating these fish.

Shame on the interviewer at the HuffPo, Louise McCready, for not doing enough research and on Clover for playing along, when anyone with an ounce of fisheries knowledge knows that statistic is no longer worth the paper its written on.