By the mid-1990s, banks and investment organizations had realized that academics skilled in mathematical modelling could help them to devise winning strategies with which to play the world’’s financial markets. George Sugihara, who had built a formidable reputation among ecologists by yzing the population dynamics of fish and plankton (浮游生物), was a prize catch. Deutsche Bank wanted him to apply those talents to its "black-box project", a secret endeavour designed to predict the prices of various financial instruments. Sugihara struck a hard bargain. In addition to providing an ample salary, Deutsche Bank agreed to let him stay in San Diego — where the Frankfurt-based firm provided a large luxurious office overlooking the harbour. There, it gave him all the resources he needed to devise models to interpret price trends from masses of financial data. In 1995, when Sugihara took leave of absence from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), his colleagues thought it unlikely that he would ever return — few scientists who have been seduced by the world of finance have later resumed their academic careers. But Sugihara has changed that trend, and is now applying his experience in finance to marine conservation. He wants to harness market forces to pr over-fishing — which governments and the scientists who advise them have mostly so far failed to achieve. In reality, Sugihara never gave up his studies of biological oceanography. During his four years with Deutsche Bank, he taught part-time at UCSD, and published more than a dozen scientific articles on complex biological systems. When his leave period was up, he says, hard science was always going to win over high finance. "No, it wasn’’t hard to leave that world," he says. "I really wanted to do science." But Sugihara’’s experience of the markets has changed the way he thinks about managing the ocean’’s natural resources. For decades, investors have traded on markets for the future prices of virtually every commodity, from grain crops, through orange juice, to oil. Yet despite worldwide sales of at least US$80 billion a year, there is no futures market for fish. Sugihara hopes to change that. By providing people with the means to make money, and offering a structured financial environment for the worldwide catch and sale of fish, he argues, it should be possible to pr stock depletion. Trading places To this end, Sugihara and a number of scientific colleagues are now seeking start-up finance for a company called the Ocean Resource Exchange. This would trade and lease financial instruments or derivatives associated with fish catches, on an electronic commodities exchange. Perhaps trading is in Sugihara’’s genes. His Japanese father was a trader in wood products, who settled in California in 1951 with his Indonesian wife and young son, seeking new opportunities away from the turmoil of post-war Asia. But the young Sugihara didn’’t follow his father into business. After graduating from the University of Michigan in 1973, he embarked on an academic career, initially studying lake cores in Africa. First he worked in Zambia, where he identified pollens and diatoms for palaeoclimate (古气候) studies. Later, he moved to Tunisia to study algal productivity and the origins of hydrogen sulphide emissions from Lake Tunis. Sugihara’’s ytical mind found this fieldwork unsatisfying, so he returned to Michigan to bone up (突击钻研) on mathematics. "I took 26 courses in two years," he says. And with his growing mathematical sophistication, he developed a theory to explain an observed regularity in the distribution of species abundance. When he approached Robert May, then conducting pioneering yses of biodiversity at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, with the theory, May immediately recognized Sugihara’’s potential — and signed him up as a doctoral student. By the time Sugihara completed his PhD in 1982, he already had his eyes on UCSD’’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, which hosted a largely untapped repository of oceano-graphic and fisheries data. "This was a gold mine," says Sugihara. "And no one was looking at it intensively." At Scripps, Sugihara used these data to develop and test mathematical models designed to probe the dynamics of complex biological systems. Among the results was an influential article published with May, which showed how to use nonlinear equations — formulas where output isn’’t proportional to input — to make short-term predictions about the behaviour of chaotic systems such as the population dynamics of marine plankton. Financial Trend setter Among those who recognized the equations’’ power was former behavioural ecologist Steven Schulman, who knew Sugihara from Princeton. By 1990, Schulman was in the New York office of the financial firm Merrill Lynch, conducting quantitative yses to reduce investment risk. In Sugihara’’s equations, Schulman saw the possibility of predicting prices in market derivatives. So he brokered a consulting deal: Merrill Lynch provided Sugihara with financial data, which he mined for price trends. For Sugihara, it was a dream. First, the arrangement allowed him to put his own finances on a sounder footing. "I couldn’’t afford to send my children to college, back then," he says. ysing the markets also presented him with fresh intellectual challenges. "I’’m driven by access to data," he says. And at the time, Sugihara was even more discreet, telling acquaintances who asked about his work: "I’’m a teacher." Former colleagues who visited didn’’t know what to make of his new life as a financial predictor. Sugihara recalls the first time that May dropped by at his harbour-side office and assumed he was the victim of an elaborate practical joke. "He opened a desk drawer to look for something with my name on it," Sugihara says. Sugihara’’s earnings in the world of finance have provided a home with an enviable sea view, plus a vintage Porsche (保时捷汽车) parked in the garage. But by the standards of banking highfliers, these are limited extravagances. For Sugihara, acquiring wealth was never the main goal, so he had few doubts about getting back on the treadmill of winning grants for his research. That’’s not always easy for someone who cuts across disciplines, and whose ideas are often ahead of their time. "It’’s too far out of the box" is a common comment from reviewers, Sugihara says. But unlike his colleagues, whose grant applications get tossed aside, Sugihara has the luxury of being able to support some of his own research, using a trust fund set up during his Deutsche Bank days. In part, that was how he funded his latest work, an ysis of environmental fluctuations and ecological catastrophes in the North Pacific. This suggests that fishing quotas may need to be set more conservatively, and adjusted more frequently to compensate for environmental conditions, than is typically the case. "The way fish quotas are set is wrong," says Sugihara. "It doesn’’t fit nature or reality." Net gains The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), which sets quotas in US waters, is at least prepared to listen to this message. When Sugihara gave a lecture in June to a NMFS scientific panel on quota methodology in the North Pacific, his talk went on for two hours — three times as long as scheduled — as agency staff quizzed him on the details. "It was really interesting," says Jeffrey Polovina, a NMFS biological oceanographer. "But it was pretty complicated stuff. Most of us don’’t have the background in chaos theory." Sugihara hopes that the Ocean Resource Exchange will provide an incentive to preserve fish stocks that doesn’’t rely on a detailed understanding of complex biological systems, and instead taps into people’’s baser instincts(直觉). "Show them how to make more money," he says. The first derivative is likely to be a futures contract for a certain percentage of a fisherman’’s catch at an agreed price at a specified time. "Essentially, these are tradable options for fishing rights," Sugihara says. Fishermen and investors could hedge their bets, which should reduce the tendency for catches to swing between boom and bust(萧条期), and give all stakeholders a tangible financial incentive not to cheat and plunder the ecosystem for the maximum short-term return. As a test of the idea, Sugihara is modeling the concept using data from a Californian squid fishery — where about 200 vessels bring in a haul worth up to US$36 million per year. But both catches and prices can fluctuate widely, it a prime candidate for a market in derivatives(即时变化率). "The motive here is public service," he says. "I think we can use market forces for conservation." Sugihara proposes to rely on________ rather than a detailed understanding of complex biological systems to preserve fish stocks.