Human health and aquatic animal health are organically related at three distinct interfaces. Aquatic animals serve as important contributors to the nutritional protein, lipid, and vitamin requirements of humans; as carriers and transmitters of many infectious and parasitic diseases to which humans are susceptible; and as indicators of toxic and carcinogenic substances that they can convey, in some part, from aquatic environments to man and other terrestrial animals. Transcending these relationships, but less visible and definable to many, is the role that aquatic animals play in the sustenance of our integrated planetary ecosystem. Up to the present, this ecosystem has been compatible with mankind's occupation of a niche within it at high but ultimately limited population levels