Owing to an injured pinky which is making typing a royal pain in the um… pinky… I’m going to point you to an article which emphasizes the moral imperative of population control.

Phytoplankton in decline: bye bye food chain?

Ocean life is being wiped out from the bottom up. The global population of microscopic plants that float in ocean water and support most marine life has declined by 1 per cent every year since 1899.

That’s the conclusion of a new study of the microorganisms, published in Nature. The annual falls translate to a 40 per cent drop in phytoplankton since 1950.

Boris Worm and his colleagues at Dalhousie University in Canada also noted that the declines had accelerated since 1950. They were correlated with rising sea surface temperatures, suggesting that climate change may be at least partly to blame.

Overfishing might also have played a part, according to Carl-Gustaf Lundin of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

Bad stuff.  Very bad.