Timothy John Bartley, Kevin S. McCann, Carling Bieg, Robert H. Hanner

Misinformation currently plagues our global seafood market. Because this globally interconnected, complex and dynamic market parallels food webs and places humans as apex predators, we can apply our understanding of nature’s structure to better understand the consequences of misinformation in the global seafood system. Here, we argue that this misinformation undermines the sustainability of our global seafood system because it obscures consumers from making informed, responsible—and potentially stabilizing—decisions. it opposes a common stabilizing structure of nature’s food webs. We first describe how food webs contain a remarkably repeated structure: the generalist module, characterized by a flexible mobile generalist predator that can adapt to resource variability by making rapid smart foraging switches between resources in space. Next, we discuss how the global seafood system parallels nature’s food webs. We end by arguing that these same tools combined with proper seafood labelling have the potential to grant consumers the ability to create a high information market that allows consumers to make rapid and informed decisions. The roles that predators play in nature’s food webs strongly indicate that information is critical to aid global seafood sustainability and the maintenance of marine biodiversity.