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An article in the LA Times discusses a publication in the journal Science (abstract) on why humans as predators have a much greater ecological impact than other predators.
From the LA Times article, it is because:
... humans have a very different, and problematic, hunting strategy from nature's other successful hunters. Humans tend to pick out adults rather than younger, smaller, weaker members of a species.
The article goes on to use an analogy:
Think of it from a business perspective, the researchers said. An adult female, for example, is like your capital; the young that she produces are the interest generated by that capital. If you kill an adult animal today, it will take years for another to grow up and take her place. But if you kill a young animal, it will (theoretically) take only until the next breeding season to produce another. In other words, it's better to use the up [sic] interest rather than to draw down the capital, because the capital is much more difficult to build back. Once it's gone, it's gone -- and so is the interest.
This has several consequences, including for the evolution of the prey species. For example, killing the biggest or strongest animals (as might be done with trophy hunting) potentially leads to smaller or weaker future generations.
Original Submission
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @02:37PM
I think it is interesting how easy it is for ecologists, sociologists, biologists, etc to determine causes while the most successful branch (physics) studying the most fundamental aspects of the universe leaves that to philosophers. Instead they focus on achieving good quantitative descriptions of reality. It makes me think focusing on this whole "cause" idea is a mistake.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @05:34PM
Considering you mentioned all but one (mathematics) of the fields that have put the puzzle pieces together I am sure you already know that cause, as you put it, is a red herring when deriving fundamentals of reality. Cause only is useful when applied to practical applications. When wishing to know how reality truly works causation reveals itself to be a convenient mistruth for other objectives. What I am getting at is the hard-deterministic, or the prenatal limited stable quantum conditions, idea that everything merely is because there is no other way it could possibly be. Within such fundamentals causation is no more relevant than a modern myth when living the actuality.
That does not mean causation is not useful. Clearly it very much is. Searching for it singularly is a mature process that has a long track record of production. Unfortunately it leaves us blind to so much.