Fishing down the food web is the process described by Prof Daniel Pauly whereby fisheries, "having depleted the large predatory fish on top of the food web, turn to increasingly smaller species, finally ending up with previously spurned small fish & invertebrates" What does this look like in an Irish context? Here are the landings of finfish & crustaceans in the Irish Sea from 1970 to 2017. Overfishing has hollowed out the ecosystem decimating many fish populations, with unquantified implications for ecosystem functioning.