© Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston; Wikimedia CommonsWriter Ernest Hemingway poses in front of a lion that he killed while on an African safari in 1934.
Other meat-eating animals do this too, but only our species aggressively hunts large carnivores and has such a devastating impact on the world's ecosystems, reports new research published in the journal Science.
"No other predator has such a large menu, such global impact on prey and ecosystems, and behaves in such a deviant manner," lead author Chris Darimont, a professor of geography at the University of Victoria, told Discovery News.
Darimont and colleagues Caroline Fox and Heather Bryan conducted the research after senior author Thomas Reimchen noted disturbing patterns during four decades of fieldwork on Haida Gwaii, which is an archipelago on the North Coast of British Columbia.
Reinchen found that 22 predatory fish and diving birds collectively killed no more than 5 percent of the region's adult fish. Human-run salmon fisheries, on the other hand, killed more than 50 percent of the area's adult salmon.
The researchers then compiled an extensive database of 2,125 species of predators around the world on both land and sea, and how they impact populations of other animals. When this information was compared with that of humans, they found that Homo sapiens prey on adults of other species at rates up to 14 times higher than other predators, with particularly intense exploitation of land-dwelling carnivores as well as fish.
Among fisheries, the authors found that the predation effect was even more pronounced in the Atlantic Ocean, which they suggest is a result of higher human densities and long-standing exploitation of fish populations there.
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.
Darimont explained that most predator populations decline if their prey declines. That is not true for us, since we are "subsidized" with agriculture and aquaculture, and have, he says, "the widest dietary breadth of any predator."
"Some might argue that humanity's dominance is entirely natural and that any other predator would dominate prey if they could," Darimont said. "While this might be true, it does not justify the behavior. In other words, just because something is 'natural' does not mean it's justified."
"In fact," he added, "humans are blessed with the ability to understand the consequences of our deviant behavior and have the capacity to change."
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