How a man raped the sea

Cataclysmic extinction of marine life began when early man learned how to fish with primitive hooks made of animal bones. The devastation continued into the next millennia, and today the world's oceans eerie nothingness that can barely recall the times when life flourished in them.

These thoughts are not mental formations of some sort of a environmental warrior, but a serious assessment of 19 leading ecologists, which on Thursday published a scholarly article about the mass killings in the oceans in the journal Science.

Based on the study of thousands of years old fossils, notes in the past few centuries, and contemporary data, the researchers built a picture of losses since the beginning of human exploitation of the sea in search of food than 100,000 years ago. They found that even areas, which were believed to be teeming with life are now only a shadow of organic resources that existed in periods before the canoe, galeons and giant tankers.

Deadly chain reaction began, the moment when the man began to catch fish on the hook. Environmentalists have set three periods of extermination that has inspired man. The first period marked by the use of indigenous boats for fishing, etc., colonial expansion in the 15th century, a third globalized exploitation of the industrial fisheries, which reached its height in the second half of the 20th century.

To learn the state of the ocean before people started to build a primitive boat, ecologists have studied the layers of old and more than 125,000 years and archaeological data on the coastal settlements of people from 10,000 years ago, and historical evidence about fishing and colonial expansion in the last 6 centuries .

One example of the collapse of ecosystems is described in the story of an ancient type of massive algae in the northern Pacific Ocean that existed 20 million years as the vast areas of dense vegetation in the sea where wildlife flourishes. Their devastation began 2,500 years ago when the inhabitants of the Pacific streams began to hunt sea otters, which are fed with sea urchins, which in turn grazing algae. As the natives significantly reduce the number of otters, sea urchins have multiplied and become more and more destroyed by algae.

Also similar are the sad stories about the fall of oyster and coral reefs and many other marine creatures that are now or at the end or does not exist.