Super Predators: Humans May be the Deadliest Hunters on Earth

“Our impacts are as extreme as our behavior and the planet bears the burden of our predatory dominance”, said Darimont.

“The Unique Ecology of Human Predators” project, supported by UVic, the Raincoast Conservation Foundation and the Hakai Institute includes 2,125 estimates of annual finite exploitation rates, drawing on data from more than 300 studies.

“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. But scientists now say there is a “super predator” that targets and kills adult prey at as much as nine times the rate of other predators: humans. He said the best option may be more of a mix of both.

The authors argue that this approach causes undesirable reverberations in the food web and, eventually, the gene pool.

Humans are also the only predators capable of exploiting fossil fuels to travel large distances at terrific speeds on land, at sea and in the air.

Currently, humans tend to focus on catching the biggest fish, because they provide more food and they are easier to process than smaller fish, which are often thrown back.

The scientists questioned whether current conservation policies, such as catching bigger fish and leaving the smaller, younger ones behind, have been the correct ones to pursue for sustainable fishing and hunting.

But the researchers said there are already examples of fisheries that do this, such as the Newfoundland lobster fishery, which sets traps with openings too small for large lobsters to enter. Reimchen originally formulated these ideas during long-term research on freshwater fish and their predators at a remote lake on Haida Gwaii, an archipelago on the northern coast of British Columbia. While the loss of the largest predators may be a boon to their prey in the short-term, ballooning populations of herbivores can devastate vegetation and have been linked to festering illnesses. But a new study in Science shows how our obsession with taking down the biggest prey is damaging the world’s wildlife.

In fact, Darimont said, fish and animals have evolved strategies for reproduction specifically to deal with predation of their young.

Reinchen found that 22 predatory fish and diving birds collectively killed no more than 5 percent of the region’s adult fish.

He wondered how widespread these differences between human hunting and fishing habits and those of other predators might be.

“Fundamentally”, Darimont said, “our hopes for this paper is that when society thinks of predators, they no longer exclusively think about wolves and lions or maybe even spiders, but they understand that our own species is not only a predator, but a dominant one”.

Numerous world’s fisheries exploit more than 10 per cent of the target species biomass available annually – the total weight of all the fish in a population – while natural predators usually take around one per cent or less, the report states.