This piece by marine scientists Ransom A. Myers and Boris Worm of Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, prompted front-page coverage in newspapers worldwide with its finding of a 90 percent decline in key ocean fish species as a result of industrial fishing practices over the past half-century. "We are really good at killing these things," Myers told The Washington Post's Rick Weiss, who reports that "fishing has become so efficient that it typically takes just 15 years to remove 80 percent or more of any species that becomes the focus" of large-scale commercial fishing. The New York Times' Andrew C. Revkin says the study, based on decades of fishing fleet data, "paints a 50-year portrait of fish populations under siege as advances like sonar and satellite positioning systems allowed fleets to home in on pockets of abundance." The Myers/Worm research was funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, which Revkin describes as "a foundation that has long promoted efforts to alert the public to problems with the oceans." Revkin writes that the authors assured him the piece was "extensively reviewed by experts from the industry and other institutions before appearing in Nature." He quotes Worm as saying the outlook is not necessarily hopeless: "On land, we did it with buffalo," Worm told Revkin. "They went from 30 million to a thousand, and we saved them because we wanted to. With fish we haven't thought the same way yet." (See: http://fish.dal.ca/~myers/papers/Papers-recent/nature01610_r.pdf - pdf file)