Marine animals and maritime communities
Marine animals and maritime communities in the early modern Atlantic Over time, humans have been using and exploiting the natural living resources of seas and shores for their own convenience and profit. Coral, pearls, seashells, turtles, fishes, seabirds and marine mammals were, and are still, an important source of resources ranging from exchange currency to food items as even to daily life instruments, and for that reason they have been gathered, captured or hunted. They all became important economic activities in early modern oceans with severe impacts both in the ecology of marine ecosystems and in the human populations who relied on them. Whale hunting, for instances, was the most extensive form of exploitation of a living resource and the history of whaling is a classic example of the relation between humans and a given natural element. This activity can be tracked through time and space, from immemorial times to nowadays, and reveals social, cultural and economic as