Too much literature?

Either I read too much literature, or I am citation happy. This latest manuscript is pushing 100+ citations. The journal I am sending this article too doesn't have a reference limit, but it's still an awful lot of the literature I'm going back to. Oddly enough, I've had to make links back to articles from the 1970's because from that time, to the time we did this study ... no one reported on these linkages from a molecular biology standpoint, at least in this particular ecosystem.