Nature: At 2 a.m. in the far north, marine scientist Alexei Pinchuk started his work as the summer sun dipped below the horizon. Using a winch, he lowered a 10-metre-long net — split like a giant pair of trousers — over the starboard side of the RV Thomas G. Thompson, which was cruising in the Bering Sea, west of Alaska. He dropped the net to the sea floor and then hauled it back up to examine his catch. Pinchuk, a Russian working at the University of Alaska’s Seward Marine Center, had harvested a whole…