The persistent myth of the oceans as wilderness blinded ecologists to the massive loss of marine ecological diversity caused by overfishing and human inputs from the land over the past centuries. Historical reconstructions provide a new scientific framework for manipulative experiments at the ecosystem scale to explore the feasibility and benefits of protection of our living coastal resources. Reconstructions of ecosystems lost only a century or two ago demonstrate attainable goals of establishing large and effective marine reserves if society is willing to pay the costs. The universal pattern of losses demonstrates that no coastal ecosystem is pristine and few wild fisheries are sustainable along the entire Western Atlantic coast. Lastly, but most pervasively, mechanized harvesting of the entire continental shelf decimated large, long-lived fishes and destroyed three-dimensional habitats built up by sessile corals, bryozoans, and sponges.
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Mechanized harvesting of bottom fishes like cod set off a series of trophic cascades that eliminated kelp forests and then brought them back again as fishers fished their way down food webs to small invertebrates.
Overfishing in the 19th century reduced vast beds of oysters in Chesapeake Bay and other estuaries to a few percent of pristine abundances and promoted eutrophication. Recent collapses of reef corals and seagrasses are due ultimately to losses of these large consumers as much as to more recent changes in climate, eutrophication, or outbreaks of disease. Untold millions of large fishes, sharks, sea turtles, and manatees were removed from the Caribbean in the 17th to 19th centuries. Paleoecological, archeological, and historical reconstructions demonstrate incredible losses of large vertebrates and oysters from the entire Atlantic coast.
Humans transformed Western Atlantic coastal marine ecosystems before modern ecological investigations began.
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