Some personal favourites of word misuse are: • “Reclaim”: the word used when sea is turned into land. It may have been a breeding ground for marine food species. Commonly the fill material is taken from adjacent, equally valuable

shallow areas. In many places the shallow, highly productive sea is priced more highly when it is no longer sea, and terminology of this kind can convey incorrect messages to a senior manager or politician. Tropical seas are one important example of the global overfishing problem. As noted above, uncounted this website numbers of people depend on protein from reefs, and in many countries coastal populations are rising faster even than the national averages. But first, who or what was Ponzi? A Ponzi scam is a well known scheme of financial fraud, named after its infamous practitioner, made famous again recently by a gentleman now residing in a US jail for perpetrating the world’s largest (so far) financial scam. In essence, the operator takes money from investors by offering a very high rate of return. The promised high return is paid to that investor using the

capital given by a later investor similarly attracted by selleck compound the promised high return. Thus, the second investor’s capital is not invested, but is used to pay the high interest promised to the first investor. That first investor thinks his large payment is interest on his money – but it is not. And so it goes on, in pyramid-like fashion. It can work for a while, but in a finite world it has to topple eventually. The total amount of capital may never build up, but is used to pay the supposed interest to earlier investors. In simplest form there is no interest at all, just capital being used. Pauly (2010) first alluded to this. What are the parallels with reef fishing and what has a Ponzi scheme got to do with reef fisheries? Reef fish are the capital in question. We may picture a person with a canoe, fishing for

his or her family – an idyllic picture (but which reader would really like to swap places permanently?). That scenario would have been sustainable; the surplus fish produced on a very healthy reef will replenish what he catches. But then he buys an engine, to make life easier (who would blame him?) but he then needs to catch more fish to pay for it so no longer is he eating all his catch but catching more to sell. In the village, many fishermen are doing the same. Then, he gets a bigger boat, so he can catch more fish to sell, but now has even bigger boat payments to make. So he catches more fish. And so it goes on. The ‘capital’ is the fish stock, and there comes a point when natural replenishment cannot keep up. The story keeps going: a businessman or a group buy a freezer plant, which needs more capital (fish) still. You can see how the sustainable picture evolves into one that is not.