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posted by martyb on Friday August 21 2015, @01:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the we-are-number-one dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @04:11PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2015, @04:11PM (#225904)

    We have an innate ability to ask about ultimate causality and to ask about causality that relates to before our proximal birth. Where were my parents born. Where were their parents born. Where did it all begin. Questions about our history both as individuals and as a species. That's why we have ancestry websites for instance. It's why we have history classes.

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