Global ocean imbalance: humans seem to have broken the laws of nature

Industrial fishing in the past century seems to violate the laws of nature

Surprisingly, all life forms in the ocean, from small krill to large tuna, seem to follow a simple mathematical law, which relates the number of organisms to their body size

In a recent study published in the journal "Science Advances", an international team of researchers came from McGill University, the Max Planck Institute for Science and Mathematics in Germany, the Spanish Institute of Environmental Technology, Queensland University of Technology in Australia and Wei Wei in Israel.

The senior author of the paper and a professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at McGill University, Eric Galbraith, said: "The fact that marine life is evenly distributed in size is remarkable

From bacteria to whales-find a way to measure all marine life

In order to understand the unprecedented number of species, researchers used various recent studies to construct a large global marine life data set, including bacteria, phytoplankton, zooplankton, fish and mammals

All life forms in the ocean, from small krill to big tuna, seem to follow a simple mathematical law, that is, the abundance of living things is related to their body size

The first author of the study and Alexander von Humboldt researcher Ian Hatton of the Max Planck Institute recalled: “Find a way to fully compare the measurements of an organism with such a large span.

Researchers also used historical reconstruction and marine ecosystem models to estimate the marine biomass of the pristine ocean (before the 20th century), and compared these data with today's data

Human impact on marine biomass

Compared with the almost constant biomass spectrum in the pristine ocean, the researchers' examination of the spectrum revealed a significant human impact on the largest-scale biomass distribution

Although fishing only accounts for less than 3% of human food consumption, its impact on the biomass spectrum is devastating

"From a global perspective, the biggest accident is the huge inefficiency of fishing

He added: “The good news is that we can reverse the imbalance we have caused by reducing the number of active fishing boats around the world

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DOI: 10.