About 10 years ago, several of us concluded that the global ecological condition of the oceans because of overfishing was as dire as that of tropical rain forests, and that future losses would be enormous and potentially irreversible if action were not taken promptly to reverse the trajectories of decline (Pauly et al., 1998; Jackson et al., 2001; Christensen et al., 2003; Myers and Worm, 2003). The scientific response was chilly, as evidenced by the statement of task for the recent National Research Council (NRC) report on the dynamics of marine ecosystems (NRC, 2006), which refers to our work in terms that emphasize the “high profile” of the articles (as if this were unseemly), the unconventional (and therefore suspect) nature of the data, and our assertions about the importance of shifting baselines and fishing down marine food webs, and that 90% of large predatory fish stocks are gone. In the end, the NRC report cautiously confirmed the conclusions it was convened to evaluate. But many scientists remain skeptical, apparently because (i) most conclusions are necessarily based on patterns and correlations using data gathered for many different purposes rather than experiments, (ii) the traditional emphasis in biological oceanography on bottom-up nutrient forcing rather than top-down control by predators, and (iii) the strong implication that most fisheries have been mismanaged for decades.

The focus of the NRC report (2006) was on fishing, but the problems are vastly greater because of the additional effects on marine ecosystems of biological, toxic, and nutrient pollution, habitat loss, global climate change, and the synergies among all of these different drivers of ecological change (Jackson et al., 2001; Knowlton, 2001; Riebesell, 2004; Pandolfi et al., 2005; Schmittner, 2005; Rabalais et al., 2007). There is also considerable uncertainty about the relative importance and interactions among local perturbations, such as fishing and pollution, versus global changes in climate and ocean chemistry that operate over very different and noncongruent temporal and spatial scales (Hoegh-Guldberg et al., 2007; Knowlton and Jackson, 2008). Trophic structure and biodiversity are also key components of the resistance and resilience of marine ecosystems to future perturbations (Bascompte et al., 2005; Worm et al., 2006), but we are only beginning to document how these parameters change across a broad spectrum of human and natural disturbance. The problems are complex because of the huge numbers of species and different kinds of perturbations involved, the nonlinear dynamics of interactions among them, and