“These are excessive outcomes that non-human seldom impose”, Darimont’s workforce writes within the article titled “The Distinctive Ecology of Human Predators”.
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“It is not simply the issue of shifting the extraction rate to juveniles”, said Reimchen, a biology professor, adding that humans would have to drastically cut their fishing quotas in order to better resemble the behavior of other predators.
“Our wickedly efficient killing technology, global economic systems and resource management that prioritize short-term benefits to humanity have given rise to the human super predator”, lead study author Chris Darimont, the Hakai-Raincoast professor of geography at the University of Victoria, said in a statement.
How and why humans evolved to become super predators is due to at least four factors: technological innovations that overcome most prey defenses, use of fossil fuels that keep us energized, killing on a large scale and not just for personal sustenance and our ever-growing population.
Reducing human hunting and fishing rates to levels more comparable to those of other predators – an 80 or 90 per cent reduction.
“Our impacts are as extreme as our behavior and the planet bears the burden of our predatory dominance”, said Darimont.
That’s unsustainable, the researchers say, and has resulted in some drastic impacts – populations of many large carnivores such as lions, tigers and wolves are dwindling.
Humans slaughter large land carnivores such as bears at nine times the rate of predatory animals in the wild.
“Humanity, in fact, selects for traits that are undesirable to humans – smaller fishes, fishes that produce less offspring, shrunken horns [in bighorn sheep]”, said Darimont.
A new study highlightsthe ruthlessness of humans compared to other predators in the food chain. Reimchen originally formulated these ideas during long-term research on freshwater fish and their predators at a remote lake on Haida Gwaii, an archipelago on the northern coast of British Columbia. There, 22 species of predators, including otters, loons, trout, and grebes, preyed mainly on a single species of stickleback fish.
But sparing the smaller cod and fishing for the bigger ones has led the Atlantic cod population to change its breeding timing, as they now start their reproductive cycles earlier in their lifetime.
Darimont acknowledged that “super-predators” is a catchy term, but he said it has more than one meaning.
But these adult fish are valuable when it comes to reproduction, and should be spared so that they can release more eggs over their adult lifespan, the authors argued. Nearby, Reimchen observed a stark contrast: fisheries exclusively targeted adult salmon, taking 50 per cent or more of the runs.
He wondered how widespread these differences between human hunting and fishing habits and those of other predators might be.
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It’s because we are rebels and have spent much of our existence breaking the rules of nature itself – by hunting the hunters as well as the prey.
