A new study, “Humanity’s diverse predatory niche and its ecological consequences,” published in the journal Communications Biology in June 2023, analyzes the influence of human predation on animal species survival. The study reveals that humans capture more terrestrial exotic vertebrate species for medicine, the pet trade, and other uses, than we do for food.
This type of predatory behavior indicates that humans are a different kind of apex predator than those that exist in other ecosystems, who mostly just kill what they need to survive. Instead, humans target species for purposes outside of what is immediately necessary to us for survival. For this reason, while predation usually refers to catching and killing prey for food, the authors defined it as “any use that removes individuals from wild populations, lethally or otherwise, via processes ranging from local subsistence to global commercial harvesting and trade” for the purposes of their study.
Humans Have an Ecological Affect 1,300 Times Greater than that of Comparable Predators
Although the ecological impacts of prominent predators including wolves, bears, and orcas are well studied, modern human predator ecology is vastly less understood or quantified. To address this discrepancy, the researchers explored how human prey choices vary depending on geography and how our predatory motivations, from areas including the exotic pet trade, hunting, and fishing, affect prey animal species’ extinction risk.
To conduct the study, the team analyzed data from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to categorize how approximately 47,000 vertebrate species are used. The team then quantified how many of these uses were both human-driven and a serious threat to the survival of the species, ultimately determining the degree to which a species was endangered by human predation.
According to their analysis, humans target about 15,000 total wild vertebrate species for a diverse range of uses; equivalent to one third of all such species on Earth. This number is a staggering five to 300 times the number of species targeted by other similarly wide-ranging predators, like sharks, birds of prey, and large carnivores. Troublingly, the researchers discovered that our ecological impact is 1,300 times larger than that of comparable predators.
Human Action Has an Especially Big Impact on Ocean Life, Birds, and Animals Targeted in the Pet Trade
When the authors assessed species by habitat, they found that humans have the greatest impact on animals living in the ocean. It turns out that humans exploit 43% of the marine species examined in the study (mostly fish), with 72% of marine and freshwater fish species being used for food. Taxonomically, birds were the most predated group, with 46 percent of evaluated species used in some way (many captured for the pet trade). For the terrestrial animals, use as pets was almost twice as common (74%) as food use (39%). Sport hunting and other forms of collection (i.e., for trophies) accounted for 8% of the use of exploited terrestrial species.
Overall, they discovered that only about half of the species which humans target are used for consumption. The other half are mostly used as pets or for clothes, animal feed, poison, and manufacturing chemicals. Animals most frequently taken from the wild to support the pet trade included birds, reptiles, and fish.
Perhaps the biggest takeaway? Altogether, almost 40 percent of the animal species used by humans are threatened by human exploitation. Most troubling? These results are likely severe underestimates of the true extent to which human predation threatens large groups of animals—potentially eventually to the brink of extinction—if we fail to pay closer attention.
Human Activity Has Far-Reaching Consequences Even for Animals We Do Not Target
These findings suggest that other animal species not included in this study may also be susceptible to substantial human-driven population loss. As stated by the authors, “continued overexploitation will likely bear profound consequences for biodiversity and ecosystem function.” In other words, the loss of these animals, many of whom serve crucial and individualistic functions in their respective ecosystems, will indirectly harm the surrounding environment and organisms by extension. For the most part, we still do not know how devastating these losses could be to ecosystems, or if they are at all reparable.
Many of the largely unregulated uses of animals, like those captured for the cruel exotic pet trade, have an unquantifiable impact on animal populations in the wild. Even if we successfully monitor how many animals are physically sold into the pet trade, we will likely never know the number of animals lost to largely uncontrollable factors including the violent harvesting process, egregious conditions at exotic animal markets, and transport conditions that ultimately result in the additional deaths of countless animals. If we do not limit our insatiable and unsustainable use of these animals now, we may live to see a future in which they cease to exist at all.
Keep Wildlife in the Wild,
Devan
