For all the militarization and territorial squabbling in the South China Sea, there is at least one good reason for the nations involved to work together: fish larvae.
One of the sea’s main areas of contention is the Spratly archipelago, an area the size of Tunisia featuring emerged rocks, tiny islands, and hundreds of coral reefs that various nations claim as their own. (China claims the entire archipelago, and nearly the entire sea and everything in it, as its own.)