unsustainable humanity is a sucidal idiot of self-destruction - science is revealing

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/humanity-super-predators_55d77f05e4b08cd3359c217b



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Thanks Humanity. Now We're Unsustainable 'Super Predators.'
Humans are "particularly intense" when it comes to hunting.
Headshot of Nick Visser
Nick Visser
Associate Editor, The Huffington Post

Posted: 08/21/2015 05:48 PM EDT
Credit: James Watt/Getty Images

"In the past century, humans have become the dominant predator across many systems."

So begins a startling new report about humanity's impact on the planet, published Friday in the journal Science. The study, by researchers at the University of Victoria in Canada, points to the huge impact that human society has had on food webs and ecosystems around the globe and dubs our species an unsustainable "super predator."

For evidence, the team only had to look to the oceans, where humans remove fish at 14 times the rate of marine predators. Humans, the study points out, are "particularly intense" when it comes to hunting, and have used powerful killing technology (trawl nets, guns and mechanized slaughterhouses, for example) to dominate other predators.

"Hunters 'capture' mammals with bullets, and fishes with hooks and nets," author Chris Darimont told reporters, according to the BBC. "They assume minimal risk compared with non-human predators, especially terrestrial carnivores, which are often injured while living what amounts to a dangerous lifestyle."

The research echoes what many scientists have warned for years: If we don't stop overfishing, we may soon run out of animals to catch. Many fish populations have been hunted to the brink of collapse, shark populations have been decimated and less than 8 percent of southern bluefin tuna remain.

The report also notes that it's not just the sheer number of animals that humans kill for food -- some estimates say 56 billion farmed animals are slaughtered annually -- it's the type of animals we take. Humans focus on adult prey, unlike other predators. A full-grown lion, for example, often opts for the smaller, weaker juvenile zebra rather than an adult.

This distinction makes it harder for animal populations to recover as breeding members are removed. "We are dialing back the reproductive capacity of populations," Darimont said.

The paper suggests altering the food we choose to hunt, to focus on smaller, younger prey. But humans are far too good at using more of the planet's resources than we should.

We've already consumed this year's worth of the world's resources, and it's only August.

Re: unsustainable humanity is a sucidal idiot of self-destruction - science is reveal

Blame the British Empire and their industrial revolution to begin with.

Thank God today this evil human race have brith rate of 0.8:1 ratio and they are irreplaceable. 人在做 天在看

Re: unsustainable humanity is a sucidal idiot of self-destruction - science is reveal

tanwahtiu said:

Blame the British Empire and their industrial revolution to begin with.

Thank God today this evil human race have brith rate of 0.8:1 ratio and they are irreplaceable. 人在做 天在看

Click to expand...

Western Humanity craps are the core of all world crisis and troubles. Idiotic greed attempt to preserve maximum human population, promoting Peace Rights Freedom, universal love and friendship, prevents wars, prevents elmnation, prevents losses of human lives, knows NO LIMITS of planet earths resources, blindly build up enormous population level and urban consumptions, calling this crap ECONOMY.

Surely will fail and ended up in TOTAL EXTINCTION, as resources gets exhausted.

Re: unsustainable humanity is a sucidal idiot of self-destruction - science is reveal

http://m.csmonitor.com/Environment/...edator-status-and-that-s-a-problem-study-says





Humans reach 'super predator' status, and that's a problem, study says
Humans are throwing ecosystems out of whack by not only killing a large number of animals, but by killing adults and top carnivores in particular, a study suggests. One answer is to act more like animal predators.


By Pete Spotts / August 20, 2015

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In this file photo, a fisherman holds a northern pike he caught while ice fishing on Great Sacandaga Lake in Mayfield, N.Y. If humans fished like fish, we'd take a smaller haul and consume more juvenile fish, not big adults.

Mike Groll/AP/File


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If humans hope to fish the oceans more sustainably, they are going to have to start fishing like fish, a new study suggests.

That means harvesting younger, smaller fish to leave more of their elders to continue maturing and reproducing. And it means fishing quotas that are more in line with what nonhuman predators consume.

Humans have assumed "super predator" status, note the researchers conducting the study. Population growth increases demand and technologies have increasingly reduced the personal risk involved in hunting animals on land or in the water. As "super predators," humans also have a penchant for killing adult animals in higher proportions than their nonhuman prey do.

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The persistent loss of adults in their reproductive prime can weak havoc on the survival prospects for an animal population, researchers say. And if the adults are top-level predators in an ecosystem, their reduction or loss can shift the nature of the ecosystem.

Past studies have focused on humans' direct or indirect roles in driving species extinct or pushing them to the brink of extinction. This study takes a different tack. It compares patterns in human hunting and fishing with those of nonhuman predators for similar adult prey.

On land, "humans are the only predators who turn large carnivores into prey," says Chris Darimont, an ecologist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia and the lead author of a formal summary of the findings appearing in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

Worldwide, humans kill carnivores at an average annual pace nine times higher than the pace at which carnivores killed each other, the study's team found. Carnivores kill about 2 percent of their populations annually, usually during competition for dominance; humans kill 18 percent of the carnivore population.

By contrast, humans kill the same proportion of large herbivores like deer, elk, or moose that carnivores do – 5 percent for carnivores and 6 percent for humans.

For fishing, humans gather up about 14 percent of available adult-fish biomass each year, with rates for some species vaulting to 80 percent or more. That 14 percent rate is 14 times higher than the rate at which piscine predators feast on adult fish, Dr. Darimont says.


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Throttling back human predation to truly sustainable levels on land and at sea will require what Darimont calls major transformations.

Perhaps the most radical changes involve fishing.

Targeting younger fish alone won't do the trick, adds Thomas Reimchen, a biologist with the University of Victoria and the study's senior author. "It's shifting the extraction rate to juveniles at quotas that are representative of what other predators use."

Fisheries-management efforts already are heading in this direction, notes Chris Dorsett, vice president for conservation and policy at the Ocean Conservancy in Washington, in an e-mail.

These efforts increasingly are based on the health of marine ecosystems, which can be restored and sustained through approaches including fishing-quota reductions and marine protected areas.

From a biological perspective, the catch-younger, catch-fewer approach the new study suggests "makes a lot of sense," says Deborah Brosnan, a marine scientist with the University of California at Davis and Virginia Tech.

Larger fish produce more eggs over longer periods of time than do smaller fish, let alone juveniles that haven't yet reached reproductive age. Culling increased number of juveniles would, in theory, leave enough survivors to support healthier fish populations.

But putting theory into practice would be difficult, she suggests.

Two thirds of global fish stocks already are depleted, with some regions, such as the Caribbean, essentially devoid of what once were its largest fish, she notes. That would make it tough to establish a baseline for natural predation rates for a new management scheme.

Moreover, in Asia alone, some 300 million people rely on fish as their primary source of protein. The number rises significantly when the rest of the world is included. With continued population growth, those numbers will increase.

And the biggest fish earn the biggest bucks. Focusing on juveniles would yield less money per ton of fish caught. And quotas likely would have to be reduced dramatically to bring them closer to fish-predation rates from nonhuman predators.

Such an approach would "put us in line with most other predators – not because predators are thoughtful creatures, but because that's what they can handle," she says. "What would be intriguing is to see how we get from where we are now to restoring a system where we could actually act like a normal predator."

Re: unsustainable humanity is a sucidal idiot of self-destruction - science is reveal

Nukes are in in the WRONG hands during the past 70 years because they NEVER used them after Hiroshima Nagasaki. Especially USA which is preventing others from using nukes after they nuked Japs. The US fuking fear their own turn to be nuked, since they nuked Japs. Without nuke uses they promoted WRONG VALUES and caused human population level to explode like nuke, but called that WORLD PEACE. Ruined the planet's resources and environment beyond sustainable human survival.

Asshole!