In a new, unique study, researchers drew conclusions that the food chains in the world's oceans are facing an impending top-down collapse.

According to Agence France Press, the paper rounds up data from oceans around the world to track marine wildlife's collective response to climate change. The study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, its authors reviewed hundreds of previous studies on coral reefs, kelp forests, open oceans, and tropical and arctic waters.

"We know relatively little about how climate change will affect the marine environment," Professor Sean Connell, a marine ecologist at the University of Adelaide, said in a press release. "Until now, there has been almost total reliance on qualitative reviews and perspectives of potential global change. Where quantitative assessments exist, they typically focus on single stressors, single ecosystems or single species.

"This analysis combines the results of all these experiments to study the combined effects of multiple stressors on whole communities, including species interactions and different measures of responses to climate change."

As carbon dioxide levels rise in the oceans, marine species will suffer a lose of diversity and total numbers, which will then adversely affect the species that feed on them, and so on.

"With higher metabolic rates in the warmer water, and therefore a greater demand for food, there is a mismatch with less food available for carnivores - the bigger fish that fisheries industries are based around," Ivan Nagelkerken, of the Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow with the University's Environment Institute, said in the release. "There will be a species collapse from the top of the food chain down."