The first species domesticated by man was the wolf, which became a dog, followed by cats, goats, cows, pigs, sheep and, later, horses, dromedaries, chickens, ducks and rabbits. Mammals and birds were followed by freshwater fish and aquatic invertebrates (oysters, mussels, etc.) and, more recently, shrimps and marine fish. The Malthusian-Darwinian dynamic of civilizational trajectories is in line with the technological progress of inventions[2], from the bow, arrow and wheel, to metals and gunpowder, from roads to vaccines, antibiotics and computers. The great invention, at the end of the 18thcentury , was the steam engine, which took us from the "animal horse" era to the "steam horse", with the immediate acceleration of energy needs for fossil fuels, coal and oil.
The question of how many species exist on Earth today, and the impact of human activities on the evolution of the living world, is regularly raised. A strong pole-equator gradient is apparent, with an increasing number of species closer to the equator, and a highly heterogeneous distribution of living beings. The notions of " hot spot " and "megadiverse" [3] have been much discussed. More than 2 million species have now been described and deposited in natural history museums, but at least 5 to 10 times more remain to be discovered. This raises the question of the acceleration of their extinction and their entry into the Anthropocene[4]. In 2001, S. Palumbi[5] drew attention to the predominance of human activities in the evolution of living things, and in November 2011, a group of authors warned: "The 'wild' is leaving", in the magazine Science. The emblematic examples of the Aral Sea and Easter Island have often been used to convince us. Today, we are witnessing the depletion of finite resources, some of them in the near future, and the acceleration of our energy needs, which still rely far too heavily on fossil fuels. The publication in 2005 of the collective work of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment( ) emphasized the notion of "ecosystem services" and redefined species extinction rates[6].The four main causes of biodiversity erosion are the destruction and pollution of natural environments, the overexploitation of stocks (fishing and deforestation, for example), the uncontrolled spread of species, some of which subsequently prove to be invasive, and climate change, in which humans play a major role.
