Though living resources are renewable, there are limits to their ability to compensate for fishing and other stressors. Limits, such as those imposed by surface area to mass relationships, govern exchange of matter and energy by organisms with their immediate environment, leading to the well-known scaling and power laws (Marquet et al. 2005; Schuster 2010) that ultimately bound biological- and ecological-rate processes. The broad consequences of these laws are realized at individual organism, population, and ecosystem levels, with mass–balance relations such as the bioenergetics principle (Kitchell et al. 1974) relating an individual’s ingestion rates to the energetic costs imposed by its need for homeostasis. At the population level, persistence requires that reproduction offsets mortality (including fisheries) and immigration balances
emigration (Cohen 1968). Turchin (2001) emphasized the fundamental importance of (1) the geometric growth potential that all populations possess, (2) the self-limitation capacities (densitydependence) that make birth and death rates a function of space and food resources (Pulliam 1988; Seidl and Tisdell 1999), and (3) the inherent oscillatory property fundamental to consumer–resource dynamics. Both the finite carrying capacities of the ecosystem for given populations and finite capacities of populations to compensate for mortality imposed by fishing and other stressors ultimately derive
from these underlying principles.