Are humans on top of the world's super predators?

Lions, gray wolves, and great white sharks are the best predators in common. Their diets consist almost entirely of meat, and with rare exceptions, these animals have no natural predators other than humans.

So, if we are predators of the most important predators, does this mean that humans are at the top of the food chain?

According to an article on Livescience, the answer depends on how you define a "predator," that is, if you kill to eat or kill animals for other reasons, as well as if you're talking about prehistoric or modern humans.

According to ecology, or the study of how organisms relate to each other and their environments, our place in the food chain does not depend on what we eat or what we don't eat, or on what we kill, says Sylvain Bonhomieux, a marine ecologist at France's Institute for Marine Research (IFREMER). Instead, it depends entirely on what we eat.

Based on this definition, the answer is: No, humans are not predators, because we don't eat everything we kill.

Humans get on average 80% of their daily calories from plants and 20% from meat and fish (Getty Images)

The position of humans in the food chain

Bonhomeo and colleagues at the Marine Research Institute set out to locate humans in the food chain, also known as the "trophic level."

Scientists usually score nutritional levels on a scale from 1 to 5.

Plants that obtain energy using sunlight occupy the first level in this chain, and herbivores are at the second level. Meanwhile, species at the third level eat herbivores, species at the fourth level eat only third-level carnivores, and so on.

Species that get their food from multiple trophic levels, such as carnivores and plants, are classified by the average trophic level of what they eat, for example, an animal that eats exactly 50% of plants and 50% of herbivores will be of the "-2.5" type, Any plant and animal eater "2.5-".

When applied to humans, the Marine Research Institute scientists set a nutritional level for every food we eat, using data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations on human food consumption around the world, and found that humans get, on average, 80% of their daily calories. of plants and 20% of meat and fish.

That's according to the team's 2013 study results, which were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This puts us at an average nutritional level of 2.21, somewhere between anchovies and pigs.

Despite this, the nutritional levels of humans vary around the world.

In Burundi, for example, plants made up 96.7% of the local diet in 2009, giving the people in that country a trophic level of 2.04.

Meanwhile, Iceland's nutrition level was 2.57, where the diet consisted of about 50% of meat in the same year.

Some scientists argue that humans' pressure on other species makes them "super predators" (Getty Images)

Humans are super predators

Because humans pose a much greater threat than other animals such as anchovies and pigs, some scientists argue that humans' pressure on other species makes them "super predators," a term coined to refer to the rate at which humans kill other species.

In a 2015 study published in the journal Science, scientists at the University of Victoria in Canada compared the activity of human hunters and fishermen with that of other terrestrial and marine predators.

They found that humans kill adult prey at rates 14 times higher than other predators.

"If you take into account the extent of our impact on wildlife, it's huge," Bonhomio says.

However, Bonhomio does not agree with the assessment that humans are super predators, because according to ecology a predator has a specific definition, which is that it eats what kills, so killing should not be confused with killing for the sake of swallowing food.

Scientists suggest term 'super consumer' of humans rather than super predator (Getty Images)

super consumer

As for the bulk of humans, they do not kill wild animals to eat them.

For example, the main causes of lion population decline are

loss

clashes with humans who do not want lions to threaten them or their livestock.

Meanwhile, people who fish in the oceans throw out between 10% and 20% of what they catch as bycatch, according to a 2017 study in the journal Fish and Fisheries

These unintentionally caught animals often get injured or die, according to what was published on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) website.

"The predator swallows what it kills," Bonhomeo and colleagues write, and so they propose the term "superconsumer" of humans instead of the superpredator.

Historically predatory human

Throughout history, there may have been less discrepancy between what a person eats and how much he kills.

In the study, published in 2021 in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology, Ben Dorr and colleagues reviewed studies in human physiology, genetics, archaeology, and palaeontology to reconstruct the nutritional levels of our ancestors in the Ice Age or Pleistocene ( 2.6 million to 11,700 years old).

They concluded that humans were likely to be the apex predators who ate mostly meat over a period of two million years, until 12,000 years ago, when the last Ice Age ended.

Humans have more physiological similarities to carnivores than herbivores (pixels)

The study argued that humans have more physiological similarities to carnivores than to herbivores, such as a highly acidic stomach to break down complex proteins and kill harmful bacteria, and a high body fat able to tolerate a carnivore in a period of fasting before being killed again.

The scientists also note that analysis of different nitrogen isotopes in ancient human remains, which tend to increase with a meat-heavy diet, consistently reveals higher levels of nitrogen than in the nails and hair of people who eat a primarily vegetarian diet.

This analysis, in essence, is further evidence that ancient humans ate tons of meat.

In their review, Ben-Dor and colleagues note that some changes may have caused humans to go down the food chain, and suggest that the main change was the disappearance of large animals such as mammoths.

At about the same time, humans began developing technology that allowed them to consume more plants, such as stone tools to process grain.

According to Ben Dor, even if we were once predators with meat-laden diets, this does not mean that modern humans should climb to the top of the food ladder.