World Without Predators

What would the world be like without predators? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick explore the essential role of predators in Earth’s ecosystems and the terrible, cascading effects of their loss. A world without predators isn’t heaven. It’s hell. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Tiger tiger burning bright in the forests of the night.
What immortal hand or I could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies burnt the fire of
thine eyes? On What wings dare he aspire? What the
hand dare seize the fire? And what shoulder? And what

(00:20):
art could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when
thy heart began to beat? What dread hand? And what
dread feet? What the hammer? What the chain? In what
furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? What dread grasp?
Dare its deadly terrors clasp? When the stars threw down

(00:41):
their spears and water'd heaven with their tears, did he
smile his work to see? Did he who made the
lamb make thee tiger? Tiger burning bright in the forests
of the night? What immortal hand or I dare frame
thy fearful symmetry? Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind

(01:04):
from how Stuffworks dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to
Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Joe McCormick. And that was The Tiger by William Blake.
That's right, classic poem and one that ties into today's episode,
because we're going to be talking about predators like the tiger,

(01:26):
and I do think some of the initials, initial concerns
that we're gonna be discussing here, the initial questions about
the nature of predators um are closely mirrored in this
poem and some of the questions it's asking. So here's
a this weekend strange religious beliefs, Robert, have you ever
heard about the There is a Young Earth creationist idea

(01:47):
among some Young Earth creationist Christians, an idea that the
Tyranno source Rex was a her before. Have you ever
encountered this before among Young Earth creationists or their literature.
I don't mean personal now. I make it a point
to avoid younger creationist thoughts on dinosaurs and prestricked creatures,
to the point that I found such a book in

(02:08):
a lending library once, and I took great pleasure in
moving it directly from the lending library to the garbage
where it belongs. Well, I mean, that's in some ways
a noble task. This is a book peddling lies to children,
but often with great illustrations. Well it makes them even
more effective. But yeah, so so you're saying, like say,
what now Tarrannosaurus rex was a her before that just

(02:30):
runs countered everything that I've I've ever read. Now, I
want to be clear, I don't want to be unfair. Uh.
This is not generally a belief held among Christians or
anything like this. This is specifically a subset of Young
Earth creationists who believe this. But if you just google it,
you'll find all kinds of fundamentalist literature arguing that the
t rex and all other dinosaurs were herbivores. They ate

(02:52):
exclusively plants, And to be very clear, this is false.
All evidence points to the tarrannisa is Rex having a
meat based diet. There's some debate actually over whether the
t rex was primarily a hunter predator or was primarily
a scavenger of dead animals, and we can come back
to that in a minute. But morphological analysis of the

(03:13):
t rex skull alone will tell you very clearly that
this is a meat eating animal. It's got the teeth
of a meat eating animal, it's got the skull and
jaw shape of a meat eating animal. It looks like
it was built for applying crushing bites to prey animals
and then powerfully pulling its head to move the animal's
body or to rip away flesh. Now, as for the
question of whether these mighty therapod dinosaurs were primarily hunter,

(03:36):
predators or scavengers, we discussed one strong piece of evidence
that the therapod relative of the t rex, the Alisaurus,
was a predator in our Kimbodian Stegasaurus episode. You remember
that it was another weird intersection between religious beliefs and dinosaurs.
But anyway, in that episode we talked about the allosaurus
who clearly died from an injury in a fight with

(03:58):
a stegosaur. It got a thagon miser spike right to
the crotch, and the way the bone has been preserved,
it's clear that that's what happened. This is the opinion
of the paleontologist Robert backer Um that that it died
in a fight with the stegasaur it and so of
course that really makes it look like the allosaurus was
a predator. It seems like it would be unlikely that
a scavenger would get thagomized in the crotch like that,

(04:19):
so it was trying to attack pray. But anyway, the
question is why would somebody, for religious reasons believe that
meat eating dinosaurs were actually herbivores. Like, I don't remember
anything in the Bible about the t rex. Uh. So
I've tried to look up the reasoning behind people who
believe this, and it seems to be sort of a
consequence of other beliefs. So the people who have written

(04:41):
on this, they sometimes refer to a passage in the
first chapter of the Book of Genesis. It's Versus thirty,
and it says, quote, and God said, see, I have
given you every herb that yields seed, which is on
the face of the earth, and every tree whose fruit
yield seed to you, it shall be for food. Also
to every beast of the earth, to every bird of

(05:02):
the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth
in which there is life. I have given every green
herb for food. And it was so. So that's a
verse that generally says, hey, animals, time to eat some vegetables.
And then, of course, also there seems to be more
broadly a widespread belief that meat eating would represent some

(05:23):
kind of compromise to the idea of the original creation
of the world as perfect. It would imply that Eden
was not truly a perfect paradise. Well, I guess it
is kind of an interesting theological question, right, I mean,
could could Eve have really messed things up all that much?
If prior to the fall there were predators feeding on
other creatures young, or you had parasite induced blindness occurring,

(05:45):
or even something as victimless as a buzzard tearing into
a dead antelope. These are I think, because these are
nasty images, people tend to assume that like, oh well,
if that were to take place, it would definitely foul
the balance of creation. Yeah, if there were tigers in
the garden, and then we can't possibly envision them as anything,
but then to to try and imagine, say a tiger,

(06:07):
Try to imagine a tiger in the garden of Eden.
If it's doing anything other than what tigers do, then
it just doesn't make sense. We we can't possibly imagine
the tigers anything but what it is, because everything they
are is a meat eater. To envision an herbivore tiger
is to envision either a possible like downstream evolutionary form,

(06:28):
something on the level of say a giant panda, or
something so far back in evolution that it scarcely resembles
a cat at all, like to put it in a
frame of reference, here, the first terrestrial herbivore probably appeared
on land about two two million years ago, and it
would not have looked like a tiger. Now, to come
back to the tiger by William Blake, one of the

(06:51):
ideas that he's asking is just like to to be
very literal with the poem, is how can the same
god who made the lamb, the sweeten lamb also make
this ferocious tiger? Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make the um? The
side note um for Blake, here we the humans kind
of made the lamb, like we domesticated that that's kind

(07:11):
of kind kind of our thing, whereas the tiger is
really ultimately of the two animals, the more perfect, you know,
vision of creation. If you want to get technical, Yeah,
that's a good point. But but I think this is
basically this poem and some of these younger creationist ideas
are kind of emerging from the same thing, like how
do we square carnivorous biology? How do we square predation

(07:34):
in this kind of idealized version of life? Right? Well,
the implication of this belief, whether stated or unstated, is
that a perfect world would be a world without meat eating, right,
no predators, no scavengers. Now, this is not going to
be primarily an episode about the ethics of human meat eating.
I think there are questions to ask about, you know,
humans who know better, like what would be the correct

(07:56):
choice of how to live? But I wanted to talk
about this issue because I want to make the case
for the practical necessity of carnivori in nature. How in reality,
a world without predators and scavengers would not be a
perfect world. It would probably be a much worse world,
a world that we would not like at all for
many reasons, and perhaps even worthy of being called a

(08:18):
herbivorous hell. Predators and scavengers are important. They play an
important role in food chains and ecosystems, and they play
a role that we have plenty of evidence directly benefits
human beings on Earth. We would not like this planet
without predators and scavengers. But if you just observe the
way we talk about them, the way they feature in

(08:39):
our narratives, and the way we treat them in reality,
you wouldn't know this was the case, right, No, No,
you just did assume, yeah, that the tiger is this threat.
I mean, clearly, it's the villain of the Jungle Book.
How else are we supposed to feel about it? Yeah,
And it's all there in our mythology. I mean, there's
always like some kind of evil predatory animal or a
monster that's some kind of bigger, messed up version of
a predatory animal. Uh, and that we vilify and we

(09:01):
cast as a thing that must be killed in order
for us to survive. Yeah, I mean to go back
to our episode on the first monster. What is arguably
the first monster depicted in human artifacts, but a lion
headed human. Yeah, exactly, it takes on. It's a human
who has the characteristics of a predatory animal. And there
are plenty of good reasons that predators and scavengers are

(09:22):
often feared and that they do really frustrate people. And
it goes way beyond just direct attacks on humans. I mean,
one of the biggest problems, if you're going to consider
real problems caused by predatory animals in the world, one
of the biggest problems is livestock depredation. You know, as
soon as we had animal agriculture, predators could prey on

(09:43):
the herds of domesticated animals that we created, and that's
a real like loss of wealth from the humans who
maintain those herds. But then also we you know, there
are other things like attacks on pets and hosting diseases
and parasites, and these are real things that our motivation
for humans. But we want to stress again today, a
world without predators is not a world you want. So

(10:06):
what happens when we intentionally or inadvertently, you know, wage
a war of extinction against our betters in the food chain?
Are betters? Yeah, and in many cases are betters. Let's
explore a few examples with the caveat here that we're
going to ignore cases in which humans have dealt with
invasive predators, which is which of course can be difficult
in and of itself, but he's ultimately an attempt to

(10:27):
kind of balance the scales that we upset. Right by
introducing a predator into a range where it's not originally been,
we might be upsetting an ecosystem that was stable on
its own. So in most cases, predator eradication efforts or
general predator culling or control efforts, they stem from this
human unbalancing of the natural environment, and it usually goes

(10:48):
down about like this. So you have predators and prey
and they live in an involved balance. Then humans come along,
they move into the area. What do they do well,
they start building stuff and expanding. That leads to habitat
loss for the the natural organisms that live in the area,
including the predators. And then predators are killed or driven
off when they encroach upon human territory. And then humans

(11:10):
are raised domesticated food species, and then predators are drawn
to those food species, the lambs that that we have
framed exactly. And then uh, and then the predators are
killed or driven off as a result of it. Yeah,
it creates a tough situation. I mean, we can look
to two examples of it in today's world. For instance,
in modern Botswana. Uh, there's this need to protect both

(11:32):
valuable cattle and threatened lions species. Local cattle farmers frequently
resort to violent retaliation against the predators. Uh. And then again,
the lions themselves are endangered. They are only about thirty
thousand lions left in the wild, right, so conservationists don't
want to see the lions killed. But then again, if
you're a farmer and lions are attacking your cattle, you

(11:53):
can very well understand why the farmer feels that way, right. Uh. Now, incidentally,
there's a there's a really interesting up potential solution. I
don't know if you called a solution as much as
maybe a band aid for the scenario that has been explored,
but a conservation biologist, Dr Neil Jordan's has actually rolled
out a program to paint eyes on the rear ends
of cattle to help to rely on attacks. Uh not

(12:16):
unlike anti tiger masks that you sometimes see in belief
parts of India or also just sort of the naturally
evolved use of eye spots on various insects. And there's
evidence this is actually effective. Yes, there is some evidence.
Uh Um. I reported on it, I want to say,
like a year a year and a half ago, so
I haven't checked in to see what the latest data is.

(12:37):
But at the time, the data was encouraging that it
was at least in the I mean at least for
the short term, cutting down on some of these predation instances.
That's really interesting. I mean that goes along with some
of the advice that I know this is this is
probably not blanket advice, so don't use this as your
survival tactics. But I know, at least in some discussions

(12:57):
about how to deal best with encounters of wild editors,
like if you encounter I think maybe a bear or
a mountain lion or something like that out in the wild.
I've definitely heard advice before that you should not turn
your back and run because that can very easily trigger
you know, chase impulses. So what you want to do
is remain facing the animal, make it clear that you
can see it, and try to put distance between you

(13:19):
and it, you know, backing away. Uh And and that
sort of makes sense. I mean, an animal should be
able to see where other animals are looking, and if
it thinks you're not looking at it, that is a
chance for an attack. Now, another good example or wolves.
Wolves have face and continue to face a similar plight
in North America. So humans trot out all of these

(13:40):
domesticated prey species organisms that are really in many ways
trapped in a perpetual adolescence, which is key because in
the natural world that is where you see a lot
of the predation. You see the predators preying upon the
young or you know, the sick. But through domestication, we've
made sure that these species are main ideal prey for us.

(14:02):
So it's uh, you know, it's not a huge mysteries
as to why their ideal prey for various obligate carnivores
out there. Yeah, so the American gray wolf is this
is I found this super interesting. It is the modern
American wolf. Now what does that mean? So, as Carl
Zimmer pointed out in a two thousand sixteen New York
Times article on the subject, genomic evidence reveals that the

(14:23):
Eastern wolf and the red wolf, previously you know, considered
to be two separate varieties of wolf, those are actually
just mixtures of wolf and coyote d nat so they're
just their hybrids. But the one true wolf is the
gray wolf. Well, I mean, it's been interesting to see
as urbanization has happened throughout the United States, especially in
the twentieth century, the way that wild carnivorous canids have

(14:47):
adapted to human spaces. I mean, we we talked in
our Urban Evolution episode about the coyotes of American cities.
They're all over the place, and they they find ways
of surviving alongside us that we barely even detect. So,
as of two thousand seventeen, this is the most recent
data as of this recording. Uh, they're roughly five thousand,

(15:08):
six hundred and eighty gray wolves remaining in the lower
forty eight states. That don't sound like that many. Now
Alaska has between UM seventy seven hundred and eleven thousand,
two hundred, but kind of lupus. The gray wolf once
ranged from the Rockies to New England, and it's been
victim been victim to antipredation efforts to protect livestock, um hunting, trapping, baiting,

(15:32):
and some pretty pervasive scare tactics about the nature of
the wolves themselves. Now, to be clear, wolf attacks have
occurred in North America, but they are rare, and even
when they do occur, Uh, there, you know they're not
There's not just one type of wolf attack. You can,
for instance, chalk some of them up to defensive attacks,
and then also rabies could be a factor as well

(15:54):
in some of these cases. Yeah, absolutely, But I mean
the wolf is a perfect test case for people, uh
to they can see what the danger of being near
a wolf is. Like if you're told there's a wolf
in your neighborhood, you can immediately envision like, oh, I
can see how that could go bad. I could be
out in the yard and a wolf could attack me.
But you don't understand or easily visualize the other side

(16:18):
of the equation what the downsides can be if there's
not a wolf in your neighborhood. And indeed, there are
many neighborhoods where they're they're not being no wolves, and
sometimes those neighborhoods are something like Yellowstone National Park. Uh.
It's an interesting case, and this was outlined by a
science writer and rewilding advocate, George monbiat Uh. He points

(16:38):
out that wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park in
a Yellowstone that by that point was overrun by deer
without predators to control their numbers, and the results were
pretty amazing, he lays out, So they introduced the wolves
back into into the park. The wolves, of course killed
some deer, as would be expected, but then this also

(16:59):
changed the behavior of the deer. The deer started avoiding
essentially dangerous areas of the park, areas that were not
a good place to to hang out in if there
were wolves about, and these places began to grow again
to regenerate. Tree hid here increased dramatically in some areas,
he says, Uh, certain bird species moved back in uh,

(17:19):
beavers and beaver numbers increased. And between the wolves changing
the essentially the prey species landscape here and the beavers
altering the ecosystem as well, UH, they both work to
make room for other species to thrive. Wolves killed coyotes
and and this allowed rabbit and mice populations to begin

(17:40):
to rise, bringing in hawks, weasels, foxes, badgers carrying birds
to discavenge. After all of this, bear populations also arose,
in part because they were now more berries from the
shrubs that actually were able to grow. And this is
often expressed in terms of a top predator in an
ecosystem being a keystone species is a species that's sort

(18:01):
of like necessary to allow the rest of the ecosystem
to thrive as it normally would exactly. And so in
this example of what happens when you put a predator
back in to an environment, we're essentially seeing environmental collapse
in reverse. UH. What what we're talking about here is
widespread trophic cascades. These are ecological changes that start at

(18:23):
the top of a food chain, UH, and the spiral
all the way down. So yeah, apex predators are not
just monsters that live atop you know, a mountain of
bones and feast on the you know, the riches of
the things that it preys upon, and like some sort
of storybook monster. Now that the mountain wilds have have
evolved with it, and then for everything depends on the

(18:44):
predators for balance. Yeah, there is a sort of mythological
model of the predator as oppressor. It's almost like the
predator is the tyrant king of the animal kingdom because
it preys on other animals. But really the the oppressor,
the tyrant ruler of the animal kingdom is the finitude
of energy, is the scarcity of resources, and the predator

(19:06):
is subject to that too. And you remove the predator,
it's not the case that all other organisms necessarily do
well if the predator is gone. Instead of what you
find is that the tyrnt of energy scarcity and food
resource scarcity and all of that expresses itself in new ways,
begins to to oppress organisms in ways that didn't happen
when the predator was there. Yeah. I mean, as we've

(19:28):
touched on before, it's not like if you're they've ex predator,
it's just fat city. Um. You know, the life of
a predator also is filled with challenges and has a
fragility to it. Yeah. I mean when you when you
see an image of a predator chasing prey, you should
think the praise life is on the line, but the
predator's life is also very likely on the line. The
predator needs that energy to to survive, and if they

(19:51):
don't make a catch soon, they might not survive the
next winter exactly. And that's not even taking into account
humans hunting you towards extinction or making you know, exploited
movies about you attacking you know, um um nude bathers
or something. Yeah, I mean, I think about the vilification
of sharks. Uh. I often think of the vilification of

(20:12):
sharks as a thing in the past, you know. I think, like, okay,
jaws came out, and then there was a brief period
in which people saw sharks as these horrible human eaters
that had to be destroyed. But I guess my general
impression is things have gotten better in more recent years.
A conservation mindset is caught on. People know better than
to suggest we should just run around killing sharks and

(20:33):
other marine predators. But that's not always the case, even recently,
even beyond just pure poaching there have been public campaigns
against shark populations and intentional efforts to kill sharks in
certain areas. Robert, have you ever read about shark drum
lines before this? No, but they sound pretty groovy. Yeah,

(20:54):
they're not so groovy. This is the thing I didn't
know about before I was reading about this. But it's
uh so it's a lead ethal trap to capture and
kill sharks. Just one example is I was looking at
a paper from about how in the government of Western
Australia decided that sharks represented a threat to human safety

(21:15):
to swimming around beaches, so they elected to put out
these drum lines to kill the sharks in those areas
and protect human bathers. And basically the way it works
is that you have an anchored buoy, and then the
anchored buoy is connected to what's known as a drum
line buoy, a floating buoy that itself has a a
triggering magnet um and then it's got a hook that's

(21:39):
baited and so the sharks go and bite the hook
and then they get stuck, and then it sends off
a signal to let people know, Okay, we've caught one.
Uh And so yeah, there were just these traps set up,
and there was a great controversy about it in Australia
because there was obviously, you know, people were saying, like
we we don't need to be killing sharks. Maybe it
would be better to change the place as we swim

(21:59):
than to just kill all these animals. Yeah, that does
not sound good. I I was thinking of shark drum circles.
That would be a different scenario. Well wait, now, if
it's a drum line in that, in that like marching band,
like marching drums, Yeah, well that would be good too,
but not very groovy. That's more. You know, it's a
little it's a little more straight laced. Yeah, you gotta
be worried when sharks start doing military formations. But whether

(22:21):
I mean, whether due to deliberate human persecution or not.
Lots of predators and scavengers we know, have seen drastic
declining populations in the past few hundred years. According to
a study we're about to talk about by O'Brien and
and co authors, leopards have vanished from about seventy eight
percent of their historic range. African lions are on the

(22:42):
decline outside of protected areas of twenty two vulture species
on Earth seventeen or in decline due to human activities.
So predators and scavengers are having a tougher time than
they've ever had, which is dangerous. And one of the
key points really this episode is that, yeah, you can't.
It's not just the monster disappearing from but it kind

(23:03):
of is you take the monster out of a story,
and then how much of a story do you really have?
If you take Grendel out of Bowolf? What do you have?
You're left with just kind of a boring story about
a rampaging psychopath. But if you and likewise, if you
take the the apex predators out of the scenario here,
then it then it results in this kind of environmental
collapse that we've discussed. Well, here's what I'd like to say.

(23:24):
I'd like to see an alternate version of Beowulf like
John Gardner's Grendel. Except what happens is after Beowulf kills Grendel, uh,
the deer that Grendel normally eat overpopulate the forest and
they spread a lot of disease, and everybody in her
off cars meat Hall dies because they all get tick
born diseases. Right it, man, that's the realistic outcome. Well,

(23:45):
maybe we'll explore examples like that when we come back
from a break. Thank alright, we're back, all right. So
I was looking at a paper in Nature, Ecology and
Evolution published this year called the Contribution of Predators and
Scavengers to Human well Being by Christopher J. O'Brien, Alexander Braskowski,
Hawthorne Bear, Neil Carter, James Watson, and Eve McDonald madden.

(24:11):
And so the basic idea of this paper is that
it's a huge literature review. It looks at papers from
you know, all over the place to try to find
documented examples of ways that predators and scavengers make human
life better or removing them demonstrably makes human life worse.
And so they start off talking about how predators and
scavengers provide lots of benefits to humankind and we rarely

(24:33):
recognize this, like humans and wild predators have undergone a
process of coadaptation in the past few thousand years, with
some beneficial outcomes for both. But this state of co
adaptation depends on human tolerance of these animals, and as
we've seen, this tolerance is not given a lot of times.
We'll put out the drum lines will do wolf culling uh,

(24:54):
and without predators and scavengers our world would be much
much worse. Ecological research has shown this in many ways.
So for example, predators regulate the populations of herbivores below
them on the food chain, which if allowed to grow unchecked,
could easily overgraze and destroy plant species important to human life.

(25:15):
Another thing is that scavengers consume and dispose of animal
carcasses and organic ways that we do not want piling up. Uh.
The loss of predators and scavengers can destroy ecosystems by
causing quote a loss of plant species, diversity, biomass, and
productivity that in turn effect disease dynamics, carbon sequestration, and

(25:36):
wildfire risk and Robert this seems to be along the
lines of what you were talking about with the wolves
and Yellowstone. And then also sometimes you can estimate the
health of an entire ecosystem simply by looking at how
the top predators and scavengers are doing like they will
be They will sometimes almost be like a data sheet
you can check out to see what everything else on

(25:56):
the food chain is looking like. And yet, as we
mentioned earlier, lots of predator and scavenger species around the
world are still in decline due to human behavior, including
everything from poaching to culling, to ecosystem destruction and to
climate change. And there are actually documented cases where people
intentionally tolerate predators and scavengers, especially scavengers, because they're aware

(26:18):
of their benefits. Like the authors talk about how uh scavenger,
the scavenger of the Egyptian vulture. This is a bird
species that's suffering and decline around the world, but there
are places in Socotra, Yemen where they're doing well because
the people are aware of the benefits they provide, specifically
removing livestock and human waste, which if not removed, can

(26:38):
cause water contamination. And that's no joke. The risks of
water contamination due to waste runoff are serious, and this
type of contamination is not just something that say, happens
in Yemen. It can happen all over the world and
often does. I found a New York Times article from
two thousand nine by Charles do Hig about how the
residents around Morrison, Wisconsin were sickened contamination of water resources

(27:01):
from agricultural waste basically manure breeds, parasites and bacteria which
flow into the groundwater. And to read a quote from
that article quote in Morrison, more than a hundred wells
were polluted by agricultural runoff within a few months, according
the local officials, as parasites and bacteria seeped into drinking water,
residents suffered from chronic diarrhea, stomach illnesses, and severe ear infections.

(27:26):
And then they quote a woman living in the area
who said, sometimes it smells like a barn coming out
of the faucet. Now, that's that's not always as much
of a bad sign. Robert, have you ever smelled like
kind of FARTI smelling water from a faucet somewhere? Um,
I mean, I guess sometimes you know, you're at the
beach and the you know, beech water can have a
certain odor. I'm not sure if I would say it's,

(27:47):
you know, like a barn smell or anything, but I'm
trying to remember the last place I was where the
tap water was like that. But I've definitely smelled it before.
It is a little disconcerting, even if you know it's
probably safe. Like you go to brush your teeth and
and it smells like toots for real. Zase has haunted
your bathroom. I can't believe he's summoned toots for realities.
But now, of course the reverse is also true. There

(28:09):
are places where the water certainly seems appetizing, but it's
not actually drinkable exactly. So anything you can do to
manage runoff of dangerous waste running into water sources is big,
and so a lot of times predators and scavengers, particularly
scavengers can do that. Another example is the Tigray region

(28:30):
of Ethiopia, which has spotted hyenas, and the humans of
this region tend to tolerate them because the hyenas eat
the carcasses of dead livestock as well as unburied human corpses,
which reduces the risk of disease and the settlements, And
so disease and human settlements is a big part of
the benefits provided by predators and scavengers. Some of the
biggest diseases were worried about in the world are zoonotic diseases,

(28:53):
diseases that have animal vectors like the zekeovirus UH, strains
of flu you know, avian flu, swine flu UH, the
Ebola virus, lime disease, and so there are several ways
predators can reduce chances that we catch diseases from animals,
and one of them is by reducing the density of
host populations. And so the way that works is this, um, say,

(29:15):
it's flu season. You want to avoid catching the flu?
Uh what? What what's a good day look like if
you want to avoid catching the flu? Is it like
going out to the cannibal corpse concert and washing in
the pit? Or is it going for a walk in
the woods by yourself? Uh? Well, if you don't want
to catch the flu, yeah, go in the woods by yourself. Yeah, exactly.
I mean density, literal population density, how much organisms of

(29:39):
the conspecifics spend, how much time they spend around each other,
how close they get, how much they contact the same surfaces,
and all that that's directly related to the spread of
the disease. And so if you reduce the density of
a population, you reduce the rate at which the disease spreads. So, so,
to go back to our our Yellowstone example, like, if

(30:00):
you have the deer just um, just unopposed by predators,
they're just hanging out all over with each other, and
that that creates a more potential for something like this
to take off. But if they're if they're patrolled by predators,
then they're going to be perhaps more fragmented and fewer
in number because of the members of their uh their
species that are picked off by the predators. Exactly, thinning

(30:22):
out the population of deer could potentially limit the spread
of dearborn diseases. And then, of course there's also the
more direct effect that if you limit the population of
an animals ay dear, it will be less likely that
any given human in the area is exposed to a deer,
and thus less likely the disease spreads from the deer

(30:42):
to the person. Just a few examples cited by the authors.
One is that around Sanjay Gandhi National Park in India,
leopard predation on dogs has greatly reduced the frequency of
dog bites in the region and thus lowered the incidents
of rabies transmission to humans. Researchers think that generalist predators
like foxes can help protect people from lime disease by

(31:03):
controlling populations of mice, since mice or a primary reservoir
for ticks carrying the disease, and then we don't think
to be thankful to frog tadpoles, but tadpoles probably play
a really important role in limiting the worldwide risk of
mosquito born diseases like dingay fever because they eat mosquito eggs.
Of course, I mean we've we've kind of looked at

(31:24):
this and from the opposite direction that like, you know,
why do we have mosquito as well, because actually mosquito
larva are an important part of many, uh many diets
out there, And yeah, it makes sense too that you'd
want the animals that eat those larva otherwise explosion of
mosquitoes exactly. But also predators and scavengers can reduce our
disease risk through a mechanism known as competitive exclusion, and

(31:46):
this is basically out competing disease hosts for resources or territory.
So an example here would be vultures sometimes outcompete stray
dogs for the main scavenging niche in and around human settlements,
and this can be a good thing for reducing stray
dog bites on human and human exposure to rabies. And
then sometimes removing natural predators and scavengers from a native

(32:08):
ecosystem can lead to their automatic replacement by other predators
and scavengers, which might be much worse for human health.
For example, the author's right that scavengers can replace vultures,
and the ones that replace them can include gulls, rats,
and invasive foxes, all of which can pose risks to
humans and can themselves be disease hosts because of its nature.

(32:30):
If there's a meal to be had, something is going
to get in and eat it, And if you wipe
out the predator that's most highly evolved to deal with it,
then somebody else is going to take a shot at it.
Wouldn't you rather the the predator that's there to eat
the meal be the one that the ecosystem is already
adapted around, unless there's stability to the ecosystem. So there
are tons of ways that predators and scavengers limit human

(32:53):
exposure to diseases. But another thing that's interesting is the
way that predators apparently increase agricultural output. I mean, a
huge amount of agricultural wealth every year is lost to
pest species that consume crops. The author is a side
to study estimating that ten of global financial losses and

(33:15):
agricultural wealth are due to animal species that come and
eat the crops, and that that's a huge amount of
lost wealth over the whole globe, and so current methods
of preventing that kind of loss are not always great, right.
They often consist of chemical pesticides, which frankly are something
that that we're still studying and we don't know all
of the negative effects of, you know, many years down

(33:37):
the road. Yeah, but but I mean ultimately that the uh,
the argument here is pretty simple, like, if something is
eating your crops, what better way to prevent that from
happening than having a naturally occurring predator to drive them off. Exactly,
I'm trying to keep birds from eating all the figs
in my fig tree, and all I have is like
a fake owl to set up there next to which,

(34:00):
Oh you have a scare owl? I do? Yeah? Or
wait to scarecrow. You have a scarecrow owl? Yes, it's
it's not a replican owl like the Fabulous Woman having
Blade Runner. That one was too expensive, minds the ten
dollar model. Its head doesn't even bob. But quick poll,
do you have a favorite killer scarecrow movie? Oh? I
mean they're all kind of terrible, aren't they. That's a

(34:21):
subgenre that never really caught on, Like you might think, well,
there's a lot of potential. They're they're they're they're so creepy.
I mean, I guess I love the scarecrow batman villain
if he counts. Oh yeah, he's a good one. Yeah
he was. Well, I liked him in the animated series. Yes,
he was a lot of fun in that too. Yeah.
I guess there's some some scarecrow movies coming to mind,
but I feel like it was a little icky. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah,

(34:43):
that's the main one that sticks. They often tend to be.
I what I'd much rather have is an actual owl, though,
that would just live in my backyard and uh and
scare away, you know, an appropriate number of predators. They
can have some of the figs. I'm not greedy. I
just want to make sure that I have some too well.
I mean, predators like that are important not just for
your own personal figs, but for for the crops that
sustain economies and that that feed people and that are

(35:06):
turned into animal feed and all that kind of stuff that,
you know, the backbone of an agricultural economy. Like it
has often been speculated by by researchers that species like
bats and some birds are the most economically important non
domesticated animals on Earth, and this is because of all

(35:27):
of the pest control that they naturally do in the
wild on pests that would otherwise eat all of our crops.
And so the author's site research that indicates like the
densities of pests like the corn earworm or the cucumber
beetle can be suppressed by almost sixty percent by back communities,
and bats can also help suppress the spread of fungus

(35:47):
in corn crops, and so this leads to like real
dollars saved and and predatory birds do similar things. They've
been shown to be valuable in cocao plantations, saving more
than thirty percent of crop output. Speaking of owls, the
barn owl is a huge lifesaver when it comes to
saving agricultural output um. Apparently, according to the authors quote,

(36:08):
the barn owl Tito alba has a diet made up
of about agricultural pest species in agricultural fields of California. Wow,
barn owls are a great species to bring up in
this because the barn owl, of course is normally going
to set up shop and nest in um and it's
essentially like a hollowed out tree or tree trunk kind

(36:31):
of in a situation. But now they're co adapted. But
that's right, they they they also are fine with sant
abandoned barn because this also perfectly replicates the environment they need.
But it's kind of a domino effect though, right as
as humans expand, suddenly that there are fewer places for
them to naturally build their nest. And if you don't

(36:51):
have you know, empty barn sitting around, then they also
don't have a place to build their nests. But this
has led to many people to put up nesting box
is for barn owls, which is essentially just a uh
what it sounds like a box, like a mini portion
of a barn that you can just put in the
top of a tree to encourage them to roost their
nice I've never heard of that. Yeah, there's a children's

(37:13):
book about it that's reading it about it about it
the other day with my son. Now, I will say
I think probably barn owls are not vilified as much
as some animals like wolves or Yeah, I think they're
mainly suffering from you know, incidental habitat loss, which can
be sufficient enough to eradicate a species. But yeah, they're
not having a deal on top of that, with people,

(37:34):
you know, essentially raising their pitchforks against the owls. But
I mean when it comes to other noticeable larger predators
like dingoes, even they apparently increase agricultural output, they help
our farmers too, Like lots of animal. Ranchers obviously don't
like carnivores like dingoes because sometimes they prey on their herds,
but sometimes wild carnivores actually protect herds in pastures where

(37:57):
there are also wild herbivores cause the dingoes or the
other animals like that reduced the number of wild herbivores
and thus reduce competition for grazing. So, for example, research
in Australia is shown that the presence of dingoes can
increase agricultural production by reducing populations of red kangaroo, which
compete with livestock for grazing land. And a lot of

(38:19):
times cattle farmers don't realize this and they'll kill dingoes,
but it has been estimated the dingoes significantly increase output
biomass per hectare of land. If you give rid of
all the dingoes, then you're gonna have to deal with
all these kangaroos. And what are you gonna do? Just
keep killing and killing. Well, yeah, probably that's kind of
what humans do. I guess it could be. Hey, when

(38:39):
it comes to your garden. They signed a study by
the way that says research has shown that skunks reduced
pests in North American gardens and increase the yields of
those gardens. So you need to get yourself some skunks. Well,
I've certainly heard the argument for possums based in a
large part on the number of I believe it's ticks
that that that the average possible will eat, so they

(39:01):
meant be much to look look at. But if you
have a possum in your yard, it's potentially cutting down
on on some of the pests you would have to
deal with. Oh man, anything that will get rid of ticks.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend, even if
it's a possum. Uh. But what about the enemy of

(39:22):
my enemy of my enemy, which is your dog or cat? Well,
you know, collateral damage, I guess. But now this is
a good point. This is why one of the reasons
why my cat lives indoors. Now, yeah, I love dogs
and cats, but I mean it is certainly true that
that domesticated dogs and cats can really mess up an
ecosystem if released upon the wild. Yeah, I think about

(39:42):
this a lot. In our neck of the woods, we
have a lot of feral cats, pretty common occurrence, I think,
uh in North America. And yet yeah, they're they are
they are super, They're little super predators are there in
their own way, like they are able to just ravage,
especially the bird population. When we had Jason or the
local Atlanta Bird Exploding podcast, he talked to us a

(40:03):
lot about the damage done by just releasing cats and
letting them go outside. They're driving off our possums and
they're not eating any of the ticks. It's a disgusting part.
That's a good point. Why don't the cats just eat
the ticks directly? That would be great, But of course
they'll never comply anyway, So uh, we don't stop there. Okay.

(40:23):
So predators and scavengers clearly reduced disease risk and disease
spread among animals and among humans. They benefit agriculture, They
apparently actually benefit human life in urban areas in plenty
of ways. Like so, so there are plenty of things
that cause humans and wild animals to come into contact.
Of course, expanding human settlements and habitat destruction would be

(40:46):
a big part of that. Yeah, do is to go
hand in hand. But then, of course animals are often
attracted to high calorie foods and shelter, and those are
available in abundance and human settlements. But there are tons
of ways that predators and scavengers in urban areas, even
within human settlements, are beneficial, including removing waste and carcasses
that this happens all the time, like golden jackals in

(41:08):
Serbia apparently removed just tons of animal waste, including road
killed animals and stuff like that. And then also you've
got the fact that in many urban areas, natural predators
control populations of other animals that directly cause harm to humans. Uh,
here's a big one. You might not consider natural predators
reduce wildlife vehicle collisions. Oh, this makes sense as well,

(41:32):
because what are all these excess prey animals doing but
running in front of my car? They often are, so
the author's right quote. One study found that the potential
recolonization of cougars over a thirty year period in the
Eastern USA would reduce dear populations and thereby curtail dear
vehicle collisions by twenty two percent. The authors estimated that

(41:53):
this reduction and collisions would result in a hundred and
fifty five fewer human deaths, twenty one thousand four fewer
human injuries, and two thirteen billion dollars in saved costs.
If those estimates are right, that's a heck of a
lot of damage just caused by deer getting in front
of your car. Yeah, and I have been in I
have been in the vehicle, if I remember correctly, on

(42:15):
two different incidents when I've the vehicle has hit a deer,
there's some way, shape or form. In one case, the
deer had already been hit and it was just like
coming over a hill and there it was, and like
the car went right over it. But uh, yeah, I
feel like this is a this is an increasingly common
occurrence if you're doing any amount of driving outside of
an urban environment, and even even with within an urban environment,

(42:37):
you're still facing the risk of those squirrels or you know,
various stray animals that may be running out in front
of your vehicle. Well, depending on what kind of urban
environment it is there, there are still sometimes even deer.
I mean, I think about how often you see deer
in some cities in Tennessee. Certainly, one funny note that
I that was in this paper was that apparently reintroducing

(42:59):
predator ters can even reduce auto insurance premiums and affected
areas because they, you know, reduce the risk. I wonder
if I can contact my my insurance companies say, look,
I introduced we introduced a mountain lion into my neighborhood. Up,
can you bring my my premium down a bit? Plan
on releasing wolves? How will that affect my rate? No?

(43:23):
I bet they won't do it on an individual basis, unfortunately.
But yeah, so we've got this issue where we know
that predators and scavengers provide immense benefits to humans. Of course,
they provide benefits to the ecosystems themselves, but they provide
immense benefits to human economies, to human public health, all
of that. And yet we are going to continue to

(43:44):
have these conflicts because predators are sometimes ferocious. They will
sometimes attack our domesticated animals and all that, they will
sometimes attack humans as long as they're going to be
humans and predators and scavengers in these shared zones, these
sort of uh middle zones where both humans and predators
can inhabit there will be these conflicts, and yet we

(44:06):
don't want to eliminate them. So part of the question
is how do you get people to understand that, even
though occasionally there will be wolf attacks on people and
stuff like that, that is massively counterbalanced by the benefits
provided by these creatures. Yeah, you have to have to
weigh all the benefits and not just you know, overreact
to one media report about uh, you know, a predation

(44:27):
scenario involving a human infant is as shocking and horrible
as that can be. Um, you know, obviously, I mean,
it's still not a reason to say set out to
destroy all crocodiles or all wolves, right, And and part
of the problem is that media reports can just even
without intending to do it, sensationalized predators. Like the one

(44:48):
thing I often think about is the type of media
story that doesn't say we should kill all predators, but
it just makes a media story out of predators citing
in a human area, you know, because other a wolf
in the neighborhood. Yeah, because otherwise, when is the shark
making the news. It's making the news because it was
seen in a human swimming area, a human caught it,

(45:09):
or killed it, or the reverse happened. Of course it
attacked or killed a human there. Yeah, there is no
story about the thousands of sharks that swam by without
anybody noticing them. And you make a good point that
very often the point of conflict here arises because of
human aggression, not because of the aggression of the animal,
or even if it's not aggression. It's like if you've

(45:29):
if we've all heard, you know, do not feed the
wild animals, which is wonderful advice for a number of reasons,
but if it's a if it's a prey species, especially
if it's a species that that could potentially attack a human,
then you should not do anything to to shrink the
natural distance between our species, right. So, I mean, I

(45:50):
think one thing in this space that's important is trying
to find smart strategies, Smart strategies that don't involve just
killing predators and scavengers outright because we don't like them,
or because there was one unfortunate point of conflict between
humans and whatever the species is that's local, but finding
ways to try to reduce encounters between humans and humans

(46:15):
in their livestock in these species while allowing the species
to live the example you mentioned earlier with just like
being able to paint eyes on the back of cattle,
that that sounds like a brilliant example of a solution there. Yeah,
make the make the the the the humans cattle less
appealing slightly as the feeling maybe even. But then the
reverse is well, the lions that are gonna hopefully go

(46:36):
eat other things, other prey animals that are still allowed
to reside in the natural environment. Yeah, of course not
destroying natural habitats helps as well. Yeah, the to whatever
to the more we unbalance the given environment, like, the
more complicated it is to try and figure out what
the new balance is, or certainly to try and achieve

(46:56):
anything like the old balance. But anyway, if so, summary
of all that, you've got the disease control, you've got,
agricultural protection, you've got all these direct benefits on human life,
like reducing auto collisions or disposing of waste. There are
just tons of ways that predators and scavengers are benefiting
your life and benefiting human civilization in ways that you

(47:17):
don't even appreciate or understand that are completely invisible to you.
But without them the world would be so much worse.
And so I think we should just take a moment
to appreciate the nasty animals. Indeed, here's to you, nasty animals.
Let's take a break, and when we come back, you know,
we'll talk a little bit about the nastiest animal of all.
Thank you. Thank Alright, we're back. So we've been talking

(47:40):
about how, even despite our mythologies and despite some religious
beliefs and all, that a world without predation is probably
not a good world. That's not a place where you'd
want to live. Predation does so many important things. It
plays an important ecological role. But I want to think
about another way that a world without predation is probably
not a world you want to live in because I

(48:01):
have a hard time imagining how a planet that never
evolved predation would ever evolve intelligence. Indeed, I mean it's
difficult to imagine a human level or greater intelligence emerging
in the absence of predation. Our best examples of non
human intelligence are either predators that have to engage in
advanced tactics and behaviors to catch prey uh and or

(48:25):
utilize these skills to avoid predation themselves. And curiously enough,
humans seem to stand as as an example of both. Yeah, exactly.
I mean, almost everything we call intelligence, I think has
something to do with time. Right. It has to do
with the speed at which you your body does something.

(48:47):
An organism that was able to avoid a you know,
an oncoming object, but it took a thousand years to
do so would you call that intelligence? Maybe? I mean,
it seems like it'd be hard to do, but it
seems to me like very much. An important part of
what intelligence is is that it has to do with
the speed of solutions to two problems, right, and the

(49:09):
speed at yeah, the speed at which it needs to
find a solution to that problem. Because something reacting at
the level we're talking about, uh, you know, maybe not
quite the same level, but you can look at an
oak tree and say, well, the oak tree has its
reflexes are not nearly as as quick as those of say,
you know, a feral cat, but they are both effectively

(49:30):
solving the problems that are necessary to to existing. Yeah,
and speed just pretty much, it seems clear needs to
exist in the world because predation exists. Right, It's kind
of this this arms race of speedy reactions. Yeah, you know.
In a fun bit of synchronicity, we recorded this episode
the same week as our fiftieth anniversary celebration of two
thousand and one A Space Odyssey. Yeah, and you know,

(49:53):
the fourth first portion of that film, the Dawn of
Man that we were discussing, you know, follows a population
of hominids as they scrap by on hunter gathering existence,
falling to predation from big cats from time to time,
but then with a little help from an extraterrestrial sentinel,
they take their first steps towards mastery of the planet
and the use of weapons. Yeah, the monolith arrives, then

(50:14):
they suddenly realize, hey, I can use a taper femur
as a as a club. But before that, the big
cat I believe it's a leopard in the movies, a
real leopard attacking somebody in a in an ape costume.
And it's frightening to watch, just and I'm not just
saying it because I mean on two levels, because on
one level the scene is very convincing, and then on

(50:35):
another level, I'm thinking, oh, crap, that's a guy in
an ape suit in a real carnivore has jumped on him.
I can't help but have a like a primal response
to that. Yeah, So fossil evidence does inform us that
early humans fell to cave lions, two savor tooth cats
and false savor tooth cats, but they were also eaten

(50:55):
by other animals, including giant hyenas, eagles, snakes, other mates,
and is. Rob Dunn pointed out in a two thousand
twelve Slate article about about fear, we even felt a
giant predatory kangaroos. Yes, the predatory kangaroos. Yeah, the occult
occult of data. I believe it's it's called I've never
even heard of this as far as I remember now.

(51:16):
I'm embarrassed if you've told me on the show before,
and I forgot. No, I do not think predatory kangaroos
have come up before. And to call it a kangaroo,
I've seen illustrations of what it might have looked like.
And it doesn't straight up look like a thinged kangaroo
or anything, but but still similar creature. So the Ovens
seems to support the idea that that creatures like this,

(51:37):
not just the kangaroo, but big cats, et cetera, feasted
on human flesh so well into the most recent hundred
thousand years of human history, and we see this reflected
in the lives of modern primates as well. In places
where large predators still haunt the shadows of primitive primate habitats,
the young are still preyed upon, and where humans dwell
alongside large carnivores, the young and occasionally even adults may

(51:59):
fall to per day the world. That this world is
also still reflected in our our our fight or flight responses,
in the anxieties that we that define our lives, and
in our nightmares and our fantasies and our fears. I mean,
really we think back to that that a lion man
the first monster, Like, it makes so much sense that
that should be like the early the earliest known uh

(52:22):
you know, physical manifestation of our fears that we would
actually like craft that well. I mean, if you go
by one thing we talked about recently as well as
the idea of the hyperactive agency detection device, that is
a hypothesis about you know, where are our a tendency
to attribute agency to inanimate objects comes from? And but
that says, you know, the things we really need to

(52:42):
worry about there are two main things, animals and other humans.
And if you combine the properties of the two, you've
essentially got like the ultimate thing to be scared of.
It's part human, it's part animal predator. It's both of
the things that worry us the most. Now this is
interesting too, because when we think about our our ancient ancestors,

(53:03):
we do tend to think about these two things, right,
warlike abilities towards self uh and and their ability to
fight back against predators and of course prey on other beings.
I mean everything was expressed in that opening uh a
segment of two thousand and one of Space Odyssey. But
some anthropologists, such as Robert W. Sussman, the late Robert W. Susman,

(53:23):
I believe you passedway a few years ago. Uh. He
argued that it was our that it was possibly not
our ability uh to wage war against others, but rather
our ability to cooperate with one another then enabled us
to survive that era that we lived through as a
prey species. Oh. I think there's tons of evidence that
that social cooperation was a major factor in shaping the

(53:45):
animals we are today. So there we were this this
prey species barely hanging on, but then developing the social
connections and the technology to fight back against predators to
sort of overtime remove ourselves from full participation in the
food chain. Um. And in doing so, we've become something

(54:07):
more than just a predator. Uh. We've become kind of
a super predator. As Sarah Zelinsky pointed out in a
two thousand fifteen Smithsonian dot Com article, humans are unlike
any other predator on the planet. Uh, and in in
ways that that one might not instantly think. You know,
obviously we use guns, and no other creature uses guns.

(54:27):
You know, we we poison, we do all these other tactics.
But everywhere else, predators prey upon the young, uh in particular.
But humans kill healthy adults, especially when it comes to
land carnivores and fish, and those adults, she she drives
home in the article, these are the reproductive capital of
the species. So you know these news stories that talk

(54:50):
about the tragedy of someone being struck down in the
prime of their life, Well, that's that's the sob story
for most of the animals that humans kill. And while
again that the natural predation model is for things that
have not achieved that level um or they have fallen
off on the other side, the young or the old,
and this is especially destructive for long lived and late

(55:11):
producing species. Of course. Yeah. One example of all this
that Zelinski brings up is the stickleback. It's a fish
that is just surrounded by predators. It just it has
all the enemies, but the enemies mostly almost exclusively feed
on young fries and subadults. Only five percent of the
reproductively valuable adults are preyed upon each year. And that's

(55:34):
a sharp contrast to commercial fishing, where fort of the
biomass is netted and its predominantly real reproductive adults. So
from like an energy and reproductive standpoint, our kind of
hunting and trapping and fishing and all that is putting
a different pressure on wild populations the normal predation would, yes,

(55:55):
and maybe a pressure that those wild populations are not
are not a position to sustain. Thomas rhym Chin of
the University of Victoria research this uh this topic back
in the nineteen seventies and found that while humans killed
adult herbivores at about the same rate as non human
predators quote, the harvest of adult carnivores by humans was
nine times that of other large carnivores, which were mostly

(56:19):
killing each other through competition, and the marine situation, according
to Zelensky, is even worse, She says, marine predators harvest
about one percent of adult biomass each year. Humans take
a median of four and as much as or more
in extreme cases. So yeah, technology not only allowed us
to sort of escape from the food chain, it allowed

(56:41):
us to escape from the limits of the natural prey
predator dynamic. That's really interesting. So even while we can
make the point that predators are good and predators are
very important for ecosystem health and we should not be
trying to eliminate them to make the world better, they
are also very bad ways to be a predator. I
mean you can see that even in non human animals,

(57:03):
just when the wrong kind of invasive predator is introduced
to an ecosystem and see the havoc at reachs. Right, Yeah,
everything's out of balance. Yeah, but there can also be
these these worldwide, world ranging super predators like us that
just we don't play by the rules, right. We're playing
with god code enabled, you know, which means we can
just kill every creature on a level and not have to,

(57:26):
you know, whereas otherwise the game mechanics would maybe dictate
that you could only maybe kill thirty of the enemies
on a given level. And actually make it to the
end where the real ding goes. Yes, are the real
thing goes. But but one of the big questions is,
you know, what are we going to to be? You know,
can we can we step down from the super threat

(57:46):
predator throne? Can we actually uh implement more sustainable ways
of of preying upon other animals in our world? And likewise,
can we find more sustainable ways to deal with other
predators that might be threatening the the the the environment
that we have already unbalanced with our domesticated animals and

(58:07):
our crops and our the expansion of our territory. You know,
can we become something that's ultimately more, more humbler and
more sustainable ourselves. It's a great question. I mean, how
how to be a predator that knows it's a predator
and recognizes its power. Yeah. There's a wonderful quote from
George Mombia again, and this is from a two thousand
fourteen Guardian article titled Destroyer of Worlds. He writes, is

(58:33):
this all We are a diminutive monster that can leave
no door closed, no hiding place intact, that is now
doing to the great beasts of the sea what we
did so long ago to the great beasts of the land,
or can we stop? Can we use our ingenuity, which
for two million years has turned so inventively to destruction,
to defy our evolutionary history? I think we obviously can.

(58:56):
The question is will we? I mean we we we
have the ability to defy our evolutionary imperatives. We do
it every time we do something self sacrificing for a stranger,
or every time people use contraception or you know anything
as so like we we certainly have the power to
do more than just what is dictated by our genes.
But the you know, in any given situation, will people

(59:18):
do it? And that's the challenge. Yeah, that's the challenge today,
That's the challenge going forward. But I think the it
is important to put the emphasis on today as well,
because it's all too easy just to say, well, it
sounds like quite a problem. Hopefully somebody will figure that
out in the years to come, or yeah, we'll get
it where where humans are great, we'll figure it out.
Hopefully we will. And I'm going to choose to be
hopeful about it, because you know, I can. We can

(59:42):
only act as as optimists if we're pestimist about it.
Then what can we do? Yeah, and if you want
to be optimistic about our future, can a predator like
us uh learn to live within its means and reform?
You've got to at least acknowledge the base fact that, hey,
predators ain't so bad. Yeah, acknowledge that they have an
essential role to play in our environment. And scavengers too.

(01:00:05):
We shouldn't leave out scavenger. Yeah, the scavengers are also
they are they're the clean up crew. They're less, less glamorous,
but maybe even more useful. Yeah. All right, So there
you have it, the predator, the scavenger. Uh. Well, hopefully
this has UH forced you to re evaluate their roles.
As always, check out stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That's where we'll find all the podcast episodes. You just

(01:00:27):
take a journey back through time there and listen to
to uh a number of past episodes that have also
dealt with biology and environmental issues and the future and
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(01:00:49):
Deep thanks, as always to our excellent audio producers Alex
Williams and Tory Harrison. If you would like to get
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about this episode or any other suggested topic for the future,
or just to say hi, you can email us at
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(01:01:16):
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