His willingness to confront shonky science and activist academics has made him a pin-up for the seafood sector.

On the flip side, that staunch advocacy has also made him a target for the relentless anti-commercial fishing lobby which has sought to discredit him.

He is undeterred and has now launched Sustainable Seafood 101, which incorporates an earlier website CFOOD – Collaborative for Food from Our Oceans Data – a network of scientists building and maintaining a range of data bases on the status of fish stocks.

Its data base funders include the US National Science Foundation, the Walton and Packard foundations, the European Commission, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, fishing companies and Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation.

Hilborn, professor at the University of Washington’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Science, has enough publications and honours to sink a small trawler, including the Volvo Environmental Prize and the International Fisheries Science Prize.

He believes the science literature and media are full of stories disputing fisheries sustainability that are overstated, or simply wrong.

His website features Brandolini’s Law: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude greater than to produce it.”

He has now added a quote from satirist Jonathan Swift: “Falsehood flies and truth comes limping after it.”

Hilborn testified before a US Senate sub-committee in Washington DC last October that federal fisheries policies had led to a rebuilding of fish stocks, with the number of fish in the sea rising in all regions. It had succeeded by relying on scientific advice.

The major threats to US fish stocks and marine ecosystem biodiversity are now ocean acidification, warming temperatures, degraded coastal habitats, exotic species, land-based runoff and pollution.

A similar situation applies in this country, where 97 percent of fish landed are from sustainable stocks, according to the latest Ministry for Primary Industries assessment, but where other factors are coming into play.

There have been several comparisons of fisheries management systems around the world “and New Zealand always comes out among the top countries”, according to Hilborn.

Fish provide hundreds of millions of people with livelihoods, billions with their primary source of protein, and they are one of the least environmentally impactful foods people can eat, Sustainable Seafood 101 states.

It concedes not all fisheries are in a good state, with poor fisheries management leading to overexploitation continuing to be a problem in several parts of the world.

“While many claim this is the result of indifference and greed, we believe that poor management and overfishing is fundamentally tied to global drivers of poverty that strip developing countries of the capacity needed to manage their fisheries.

“Fisheries are among the most complex natural resources on the planet. In Seafood 101, we break every aspect of fisheries down to give you a full understanding of how science, policy and human interests interact to determine sustainable versus unsustainable seafood.”

Hilborn contends fish stocks in countries with good management systems – such as New Zealand, US (Alaska), Iceland and Norway – are in good heart.

That makes the doomsayers’ claims that worldwide fish stocks will be wiped out by mid-century simply not credible.

“They’ve got an agenda and will distort whatever they want,” Hilborn says.

“They have no science capacity and they’re not interested in science unless it tells a story that’s consistent with what they want to say.”

Sustainable Seafood 101 aims to put that right.