For centuries, most certainly from the beginning of recorded history and undoubtedly for countless preceding generations, humankind has considered the earth's oceans an endless source of food. Humankind's numbers among coastal and island people whose subsistence depended upon nutrition from the sea lived in harmony quite literally until very recent times when certain seafaring cultures transformed into powerful nations.

Over the past two centuries, the growing sophistication of technology applied to fisheries rapidly increased the demand for seafood as well as the capacity for its capture and processing. Markets grew thanks to improvements in transportation, refrigeration and the development of fast-freezing techniques. With market expansion came increased wealth and a diversification of accessibility to seafood throughout the various socio-economic levels of human demographics. Wealth derived from commercial fisheries begot the desire to acquire more wealth as the human palate for the fruits of the sea grew. 

With the technological advances in capture techniques as well as the ability to process great quantities of seafood on board catcher-processor ships at sea, the world's commercially desirable marine species took a tremendous beating. Over a period of a mere handful of decades the effect of modern fishing fleets took a toll on marine specie populations greater than all the fishing pressure by all the fishing cultures throughout history. Other factors, it must be noted, played and still play significant and somewhat ironic roles too.

One, often forgotten in most modern analyses of marine ecology, is the effect on prey species when nature's predator-prey ratio loses equilibrium.

For example, the advent of the industrial era saw a great demand for whale oil to lubricate the machines and light the lamps of the world's growing industrial centers. The great whales, themselves even greater consumers of nutrition from the oceans than humans, were sent into a precipitous decline. Human fisheries, growing in sophistication albeit modest by modern standards, while increasing pressure on marine resources, were for the most part kept in balance in terms of their take by the decrease in consumption by the great whales globally.

The first half of the 20th Century saw more and more efficient fishing vessels. But, as history shows, the world's commercial fish stocks found two important periods of sanctuary for marine life from global fishing pressure. Those respites were the two great World Wars when humans were preoccupied with self-slaughter and natural cataclysms such as influenza greatly thinned the ranks of people across the planet. 

The second half of the 20th Century opened to the beginning of new prosperity. Relative world peace and literally millions of reunited couples sought to restore the human population balance with the influx of "replacement" members of their species. That era was known as the "Post-War Baby Boom" generation. The diversion of petroleum away from military needs back to civilian enterprises renewed the fishing pressure on commercially sought fish stocks. And, the increase in human numbers meant an increase in seafood consumption.