{"id":6196,"date":"2015-08-26T08:16:59","date_gmt":"2015-08-26T16:16:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=6196"},"modified":"2015-08-26T09:03:49","modified_gmt":"2015-08-26T17:03:49","slug":"predatory-practices","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=6196","title":{"rendered":"Predatory Practices."},"content":{"rendered":"

Oh, we are so fucking bad-ass. Even Science<\/em> says so.<\/p>\n

The paper’s called \u201cThe Unique Ecology of Human Predators<\/a>\u201d (commentary here<\/a>), and it’s been getting a lot of press since it came out last week. \u201cPeople Are Deadliest Predators<\/a>\u201d, trumpets Discovery News; \u201cHumans Are Super Predators<\/a>\u201d, IFL Science breathlessly repeats. Even Canada’s staid old CBC, which has grown nothing but more buttoned-down and conservative since its Board of Directors were executed and replaced by all those cronies Harper couldn’t fit into the Senate, gets into the act: \u201cHumans are ‘superpredators’ like no other species<\/a>\u201d, it tells us.<\/p>\n

There are other examples\u2014 loads of them\u2014 but you get the idea. The coverage generally goes on to remark on how much more lethal<\/em> we are than sharks and lions, how our unsustainable “predatory” strategies are driving species to extinction.<\/p>\n

Really. We’re better than sharks at wiping out species. This is news. This is worthy of publication in one of the premiere cutting-edge science journals on the planet.<\/p>\n

\"Our<\/a>

Our place among the bad-asses. From Daramont et al<\/i> 2015<\/p><\/div>\n

The paper itself\u2014 basically a meta-analysis of data from a variety of sources\u2014 justifies its existence by pointing out that previous models may have underestimated our ecological impact by treating us as just another predator species. Their results clearly show, however, that we are not mere predators: in many ways we are Extreme<\/em> Predators. For example, while other predators tend to weed out the young, the sick, and the injured, we Humans indiscriminately take all<\/em> classes\u2014 frequently targeting the largest individuals of a population, which act as “reproductive reservoirs” and whose loss is thus more keenly felt than the loss of cubs or larvae. This also creates selection pressure against large-bodied adults, meaning that we are causing reproductive individuals to shrink over time. (This came as news to me\u2014 albeit intuitively-obvious, not-very-surprising news\u2014 back when I took my first fisheries biology class in 1979. I was a bit taken aback to see it being marketed as a shiny new insight up here in 2015.)<\/p>\n

The bad news keeps rolling in, hitting us in the gut with the impact of its utter unexpectedness. Most fish-eating predators just take one fish at a time. We Hu-Mans<\/em>, with our Nets and Technology, scoop up Entire Schools At Once! Unlike other predators, we hunt for trophies!<\/em> We are one of the few predators that hunts other predators!<\/em><\/p>\n

Perhaps the highlight of the paper occurs when the authors, straight-faced, point out that other marine predators are limited in the size of their prey by how wide their jaws can gape\u2014 whereas we<\/em> take prey that would be far too large to fit into our mouths. This, the authors suggest, “might explain why marine predator rates are comparatively low” compared to our own.<\/p>\n

In Science<\/em>. Swear to God. You can look it up yourself if you don’t believe me.<\/p>\n

\"Larson<\/a>

Larson nailed it. As usual.<\/p><\/div>\n

I don’t pretend to understand what this is doing in the pages of a front-line peer-reviewed journal, unless it’s some kind of social experiment along the lines of Alan Sokal’s Social Text<\/em><\/a> hoax. As to why it’s received such widespread attention in the mainstream, I wonder if it’s because the subtext paints lipstick on seven billion pigs. After all, predators are cool<\/em>. We paint shark mouths on our fighter planes, we airbrush cheetahs onto the sides of our fuck trucks. (Or at least we used to. Back in the day.) Outsharking the shark? Getting to be a Super <\/em>Predator? Why, that’s almost something to be proud of! Nothing like a bit of sexy rebranding to distract us from the fact that we’ll have wiped out a third of the planet’s extant species by the end of the century.<\/p>\n

Because it’s all bullshit, of course. We’re not predators, Super or Garden-variety, in any biological sense. Most predators wreak their havoc in one way; they kill and eat their victims one at a time. They don’t poison entire ecosystems before killing off the inhabitants. You know<\/em> when you’ve been predated: your killer takes you out face-to-face, one on one. You don’t sicken and die, sprouting tumors or weeping sores or forced into some miniscule fragmenting refuge by invisible forces that don’t know or care if you even exist. You can escape<\/em> from a real predator.\u00a0 Sometimes.<\/p>\n

“Superpredation” is the least of our sins. As a label, it doesn’t begin to encompass the extent of our impact.<\/p>\n

\"So<\/a>

So did the Wachowskis. The first time around, anyway.<\/p><\/div>\n

“Pestilence” might do, though. “Plague.” Just barely. At least, it would come a bit closer to the truth.<\/p>\n

I wonder how long it’ll take for Daramont et al<\/em> to put out a paper describing Humanity as a “Super Disease”.<\/p>\n

I wonder what kind of coverage the CBC will give \u2032em when they do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Oh, we are so fucking bad-ass. Even Science says so. The paper’s called \u201cThe Unique Ecology of Human Predators\u201d (commentary here), and it’s been getting a lot of press since it came out last week. \u201cPeople Are Deadliest Predators\u201d, trumpets Discovery News; \u201cHumans Are Super Predators\u201d, IFL Science breathlessly repeats. Even Canada’s staid old CBC, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,53,22,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biology","category-eco","category-marine","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6196"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6196\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6221,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6196\/revisions\/6221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}