These findings suggest that other animal species not included in this study may also be susceptible to substantial human-driven population loss. Human Activity Has Far-Reaching Consequences Even for Animals We Do Not Target 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. Perhaps the biggest takeaway? Altogether, almost 40 percent of the animal species used by humans are threatened by human exploitation. Animals most frequently taken from the wild to support the pet trade included birds, reptiles, and fish. The other half are mostly used as pets or for clothes, animal feed, poison, and manufacturing chemicals. Overall, they discovered that only about half of the species which humans target are used for consumption. Sport hunting and other forms of collection (i.e., for trophies) accounted for 8% of the use of exploited terrestrial species. For the terrestrial animals, use as pets was almost twice as common (74%) as food use (39%). 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). When the authors assessed species by habitat, they found that humans have the greatest impact on animals living in the ocean. Human Action Has an Especially Big Impact on Ocean Life, Birds, and Animals Targeted in the Pet Trade Troublingly, the researchers discovered that our ecological impact is 1,300 times larger than that of comparable predators. 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. ![]() 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.Īccording 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. 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. 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. Humans Have an Ecological Affect 1,300 Times Greater than that of Comparable PredatorsĪlthough the ecological impacts of prominent predators including wolves, bears, and orcas are well studied, modern human predator ecology is vastly less understood or quantified. 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. Instead, humans target species for purposes outside of what is immediately necessary to us for survival. 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. ![]() ![]() ![]() The study reveals that humans capture more terrestrial exotic vertebrate species for medicine, the pet trade, and other uses, than we do for food. Between the 1930s and 1970s, they were captured, usually as babies, and shipped throughout the United States to be kept as pets.Ī 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. Red-eared sliders are one of the most popular turtles in the pet trade.
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