ABSTRACT
Since humans first inhabited coastal margins and ventured out to sea, they have exploited marine birds. Seabirds provided sources of food and bait (Collins 1882), fishermen used marine birds for navigational information about the locations of fishing banks and landfalls and followed birds at sea to find schools of fishes (Nelson 1978, Montevecchi and Tuck 1987). Over millennia and perhaps most rapidly in the present century, human populations and their technological capabilities at sea have increased many fold, and so have their demands for marine prey. Human harvests have moved consistently from exploitive to over-exploitive levels with marine birds (e.g., Burger and Gochfeld 1994, Montevecchi and Kirk 1996), mammals (Laws 1985), fishes (Harris 1990), crustaceans (Pauly et al. 1998), cephalopods (Montevecchi 1993b), and shellfish (Dahl 1992). Clearly, these and other human harvests influence seabirds and other marine animals in many ways.
