This has been a rather different kind of research - they've been able to investigate an environment, 4,000m below the surface of the North Pacific that so far has been undamaged by commercial fishing:

'"This is a rare study of a large marine fish population that doesn't get commercially fished," said Bailey. "Other fish populations have their abundances, body sizes and life histories altered by fisheries activities, so our study probably gives us some information about how fish communities work when they are not driven by human exploitation."'

'"The predominant trend had been that people thought that fish have a powerful effect on their environment, and they drive the changes in everything else," said Bailey, a postdoctoral researcher at Scripps and lead author of the study. "What we've seen is the reverse, that fish are responding to a change in their habitat. We think that a lot of fish communities are fundamentally changed by fishing. Our study is really nice in that we are working on populations that have never been fished, so their population dynamics can be seen being driven by natural processes."'

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