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WASHINGTON (AFP) – Fewer big, offensive seek are swimming in the world's oceans because of overfishing by humans, leaving small seek to thrive and threefold in obligate over the past 100 years, scientists said Friday.

Big fish, much as cod, tuna, and groupers hit declined worldwide by two-thirds patch the sort of anchovies, sardines and capelin has surged in their absence, said University of British Columbia researchers.

"Overfishing has dead had a 'when cats are away, the mice module play' effect on our oceans," said Villy Christensen, a academic in the UBC Fisheries Centre who presented the investigate findings at the American Association for the Advancement of Science period word in Washington.

"By removing the large, offensive species from the ocean, small grass seek hit been mitt to thrive."

The researchers also institute that more than half (54 percent) of the fall in the offensive seek population has condemned locate over the last 40 years.

Christensen and his team examined more than 200 orbicular marine ecosystem models and extracted more than 68,000 estimates of seek biomass from 1880 to 2007 for the study.

While the sort of small seek is on the rise, the lowercase swimmers are also existence progressively sought after for use as fishmeal in human-run fisheries, Christensen said.

"Currently, grass seek are overturned into fishmeal and seek oil and used as feeds for the aquaculture industry, which is in invoke becoming progressively reliant on this feed source," he said.

"If the fishing-down-the-food-web trend continues, our oceans haw one period embellish a 'farm' to produce feeds for the aquaculture industry. Goodbye, disorderly ocean!"

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