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Author Topic: Defending Wildlife  (Read 35455 times)

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AGelbert

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Re: Defending Wildlife
« Reply #15 on: August 22, 2015, 04:19:05 pm »


Humans:   The Worst Predators on the Planet
John R. Platt, TakePart | August 21, 2015 12:22 pm

Watch any nature documentary and you’ll see the same story unfold time and time again: A predator approaches a group of potential prey and ends up taking down a single animal, perhaps the youngest, the weakest or the oldest among them.

Watch human beings doing the same thing and you’ll observe something different: They’ll either take the biggest animal—the strongest and the most charismatic—or they’ll just go ahead and take the entire group.

That fundamental difference in behavior, according to a paper published Thursday in the journal Science, makes humans the worst predators on the planet.

The paper—more than 10 years in the making—surveyed 2,215 predator species around the world. It found that humans kill adult animals at rates up to 14 times higher than any other predator. Not only that, but we also target an abnormally high number of other predators, not just for food but also—as with Cecil the lion—for sport.

“We are a predator of predators,” said the study’s lead author, Chris Darimont, Hakai-Raincoast professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia and science director for the Raincoast Conservation Foundation. That position high above everything else on the food chain led the researchers to use the term “super-predator” to describe humans.

Darimont acknowledged that “super-predators” is a catchy term, but he said it has more than one meaning. “We also use ‘super-predator’ because of our enormous dietary breadth. What other predator has thousands of prey species that it preys upon? What other predator impacts entire food webs? None.”

Although land-based hunting by humans affects species all over the world, the researchers found that our greatest impact takes place in the oceans, where fishing vessels can take thousands of pounds of fish from the water at once. Here again, fisheries target the largest adult specimens. “Fishers don’t tend to brag about the small ones,” Darimont said. “Industrial harvesters are after the big ones because they’re in fact more economical to process. You have less waste per fish.”


This focus on adult fish is considered “sustainable” because it supposedly allows smaller, juvenile fish to have greater access to food—and then to grow large enough to also be caught. But Darimont said it has ecological repercussions. It leaves too few fish for other animals to eat and removes nutrients—in the form of dead or digested fish—from the ecosystem. “It’s one of the reasons why there is less biomass in the ocean now than there used to be,” he said, pointing out that many fish species and entire fisheries have become depleted in recent years.

Industrial-scale fishing also results in a large amount of bycatch, or the killing of not just targeted fish but other fish species, as well as sea turtles, marine mammals and birds. “I would hazard to guess that we are the only predator that commonly and at very high rates kills animals we are not intending to kill,” Darimont said. “What a sort of grotesquely sloppy predator we are that can do that.”

Although the timing of the paper is not intentional, Darimont said he is glad it comes so soon after the death of Cecil. “People are becoming increasingly well informed about the scope and implications of hunting large carnivores,” he said. “I think it’s a good time to consider reevaluating what we consider sustainable exploitation.”
http://ecowatch.com/2015/08/21/humans-worst-predators-on-planet/

INTERESTING comment thread...

Carbonicus 

Hmmm. As a waterfowl hunter, I can tell you this story is not accurate. We don't take the "biggest animal" or "the entire group". We try and take only males so as to minimize impact on reproduction. And on a typical fall day in central Saskatchewan, where I go each year, we take 8 birds each and have hundreds come within range and escape unscathed (and wisened for the fall migration through the states, which helps survival rates), and literally tens of thousands pass over our heads.

Mass staging and fall migration of north American waterfowl is a sight all "environmentalists" should behold at least once in your lives. So is the aurora borealis. So is the vastness of the boreal forest - by air and on foot.

What most "environmentalists" actually know about the environment could fit in a Starbucks cup (with room for cream). Shame, too, because that lack of knowledge leads to things like the US wasting well over $100 BILLION taxpayer dollars on "climate policy" since 1999. A fraction of that could clean up all mines abandoned before mining laws (Silverton, CO recently, for example), or many of the 1,200 Superfund NPL sites. I say all this as a 26 yr environmental professional.

And the headline is wrong. We're not the "worst" predator. We're the best (at it).

Nelson Petrie reply to Carbonicus 

Your reasoning is hollow and you sound very arrogant, Mr Carbonicus (which I'm sure is not your real name). Your response to the article shows you are ignorant of the basic reality that is causing thousands of species to be endangered or wiped out. What you are implying is that poaching of elephants, rhinos, lions and other animals is fine because they are killing only one or two and not the whole herd of animals.

What you are implying is that lions should be shot one day and one lion at a time. You are talking about waterfowls? You say you take 8 birds each. How many of you are there in the hunting group?

You haven't mentioned that and assuming that there are but five of you, which means you'll be downing 40 birds at one hunting season. In Saskatchewan, there must be hundreds of similar groups, hence the overall impact on the birds will be just as big. And this number is not big? 40 birds is a huge number.

You haven't counted the birds flying over you. You think there are millions of water fowls like the human population? Carbonicus, you are actually a disaster for our planet. Shoot yourself and not innocent birds and animals.

Agelbert reply to Nelson Petrie
Well said. Let me add that Mr. Carbonicus Homo apex moronicous does a disservice to all predators by claiming he is "best" at predation.

As any biologist familiar with the term "evolutionary dead end" will agree, any animal that causes his prey species (this is NOT limited just to animals) to be depleted by his behavior is a FAILED predator doomed to extinction.

I'm sure you know this and the following but I am stating it for the benefit of other readers who don't. Trophic levels in our biosphere, starting with the phototrophic autotrophs that basically "eat" photons have, at each subsequent level that depends on the one above it, LESS biomass. This means that predator species require a much larger mass of prey for them to be successful predators.

This is because at each trophic level most of the energy stored in the previous level is lost. The most efficient capture of energy occurs with the phototrophs, whose "prey" is solar photons. So, Photosynthetic organisms are the most successful eaters in the biosphere, even though biologists hesitate to call the them the most successful predators (which, technically, they are). Perhaps that is a Darwinian bias at play. Darwin was rather fastidious (and wrong) about placing humans at the top of the food chain. It's the other way around.

Being an allegedly sentient species, we humans should have figured this out by now. We need to promote life on every trophic level above us if we wish to avoid extinction. Instead we worship permanence in a biosphere that requires the recycling of everything for the preservation and expansion of living organisms.

We degrade the biosphere we cannot live without with our polluting industries and then we have the nerve to call ourselves "apex" predators.

We have even corrupted the vocabulary. The word "biodegradable" has a negative connotation, as in "DEgrading". It is testament to our worship of permanence, as if that was a good thing in a biosphere that requires 100% recycling. It's not. The proper word should be "bioRECLAIMABLE" or "bioUPgradable".  But the moronic permanence worshippers among us love tokens of permanence, arrogance and egocentric idiocy like "preserved" (another asenine term) trophies of dead animals.

A successful predator eats to live and stops right there. A lion or a hyena will not bother prey animals grazing right next to them if they are full. THAT is the mark of a successful predator. Carboniicus and his pals kill without need. They, like our destructive and polluting industries, deplete the biosphere that a sentient being is required to preserve, promote and expand.

Carbonicus is more Homo SAP than Homo sapiens.
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

 

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