Humans collectively prey on nearly 15,000 wild vertebrate species, roughly one third of all varieties on the planet
From great white sharks to Bengal tigers, top predators around the world have the reputation of being sleek, fast and surgically precise in their actions. They are consummate specialists, drawing from the environment exactly what they need and keeping the ecosystem balanced in the process.
According to the study, published Thursday in the research journal Communications Biology, humans collectively prey on about 15,000 wild vertebrate species, or roughly one third of all varieties on the planet. Over a given range, humans also take up to 300 times the amount of available prey versus wild predators for which good data are available, including leopards, lions and wolves, among others.
“It’s absolutely astonishing at a global, taxonomically broad scale how unique human predators are,” said Chris Darimont, a conservation scientist at the University of Victoria, who led the research. “We have an ecological influence that tends to be extraordinary.” He added that the project began as a way to satisfy his own curiosity about humanity’s “predatory niche” relative to other species. By design, the approach taken to answer that question makes no special assumptions about humans, as though the study were being conducted by an ecologist from another planet who is trying to assess the role of humans as one of many species on Earth.
The results highlight that the most important factor behind humanity’s overwhelming success as a global predator has little to do with skill or even cunning weapons, such as high-powered rifles, that give individual human hunters a lethal reach beyond their physical attributes.
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