The prospect of a world without sushi bars or Charlie the Tuna comes from the new issue of Science, which contains a graph projecting the collapse of all of the planet's fisheries by 2048 - a wonderfully precise-sounding prediction that has approximately zero chance of coming true. Yet the researchers are right about fish being in trouble. Charlie is like the buffalo that once roamed the American West.

If 19th century researchers had kept tabs on buffalo hunts, they could have drawn a similar graph of doom. And if they wanted their study to make front page headlines, they could have warned that overhunting doomed future inhabitants of the Great Plains to live in a world without fresh meat.

Today that sounds silly. You can get all the beef - or buffalo meat - you want from Western ranchers. But to the first settlers, the Great Plains posed the same problem as the oceans today: It was a vast, open area where there seemed to be no way to protect animals against relentless human predators. Unlike in the East, the settlers couldn't build fences around herds of cattle because there wasn't wood available on the treeless prairies.

But animals thrived in the West once the settlers divvied up the land and ingeniously devised new ways to protect their livestock. They hired cowboys and worked out a system of branding cattle to distinguish their own at roundup time. Then in the 1870s came a technological innovation: barbed wire, which turned the Great Plains from an open range into a patchwork of enclosed ranches.

Today, the ocean is still pretty much an open range, and the fish are suffering the consequences.

In theory, governments are supposed to protect fisheries for future generations by limiting the annual catch. In practice, politicians are loath to impose limits that will hurt the fishing industry before the next election.

Like the old buffalo hunters, fishermen have a personal incentive to make as much as they can this year, even if they're destroying their own profession in the process.

But the situation is far from hopeless. Many fish stocks are thriving, as Cornelia Dean reported in The New York Times. A quiet revolution has occurred in certain American waters, including the halibut fishery of Alaska, and in countries such as Canada, Iceland, New Zealand and Australia. Fishermen have discovered the same tool used by settlers on the Great Plains: property rights.

These fishermen haven't figured out how to brand their animals or fence the ocean. But they've essentially divvied up the animals just as cattlemen once did. They no longer let anyone with a boat rush out to catch as many fish as he can. Each fisherman has to buy what's called a transferable quota, giving him the right to a certain percentage of the annual catch. The quotas are bought and sold on the open market like shares of stock.

Once they've made these investments, the fishermen start thinking long term. They want to make money when they retire and sell their quotas, and they know the selling price will depend on how healthy the fishery is. So instead of competing to overfish, they make sure that sensible limits are set on the overall catch so that there are plenty of fish left to breed.

When fishermen see the results of this system, they become devout stewards of the environment. The problem is persuading them to adopt the system in the first place.

If this week's scare story changes their minds, it'll do some good. But one way or another, fishermen will be smart enough to avert the Tunageddon of 2048. This range will be fenced off long before then.

John Tierney (tierney@nytimes.com) is a columnist for The New York Times.