However this is a classic Tragedy of the Commons example and the fact that Canada dithered long enough for it to reach what looks like a point of no return is sobering (I was living in the Boston area in the dozen years leading up to Canada's closing of fishery and remember reading articles about this). Some governments are simply not going to handle this well for the regions of the ocean they economically control, and plenty of the ocean (although I don't know how much of it is how productive) is beyond those areas.
All that said, we're likely to see a continuation of farm raised fish replacing wild catched. Something akin to this happened thousands of years ago as we converted to agriculture.
Thanks!
Not on that, but ppossibly the most tragic example I've ever witnessed.
Another thing that happened was that apex predators of domestic animals were suppressed and/or replaced by other predator domestic animals like the dog and cat. In general for lots of reasons the populations of humans grew substantially beyond what wild game could support.
Although deer in the US are something of a special case. They're really thriving, we could harvest quite a few more (and in a number of places desperately need to), heck, they're the most deadly animal in the US (through car crashes). This of course wouldn't happen in countries where meat was at more of a premium and/or where the population density was a lot higher.
In Australia they killed the megafauna but never went back to the agriculture they'd had and perhaps forgotten, or so said Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel.
An important lesson from the Canadian cod collapse is that when populations drop below a critical threshold, the stocks never recover.