This week, slowing down the race to fish.

Fishermen's lives are actually at stake.

Under these racing conditions, they may take more safety risks at sea.

And a newly described cell receptor leaves scientists stumped.

Frankly, it's confusing to someone who knows what they're talking about as well, I think.

Plus, our pick of the spring's best books.

This is The Nature Podcast for April 3, 2017.

I'm Kerry Smith.

And I'm Adam Levy.

About 80% of the world's fish stocks are being fished to the limits of sustainability or beyond.

Authorities need to carefully manage fisheries to stop more and more of them from becoming depleted.

Perhaps the most obvious approach is to take fewer fish out of the ocean by setting a limit for each fishery. But some fisheries have

gone further setting a limit for each individual boat or fisher. That last option is controversial,

so a paper out in this week's nature which is a real-world experiment, unfold to see whether it works.

I called up author Martin Smith to see why authorities setting a limit on the total catch at each fishery

doesn't necessarily stop all the fishes rushing to catch as much as they can.

Often the first thing they do is to set an industry-wide quota, and that may actually put a stop to or reduce over-fishing, but it can actually make that crazy race to fish even worse.

So people even fishing as fast as they can to catch that quota before the season gets shut down.

And there can also be other effects.

So fishermen might catch more of the non-target species

or what we would call bycatch.

And also we have some evidence that suggests in this race.

...