Pity the Poor Apex Predator

Who hunts the hunter?

We’re it. The top of the heap. Apex Predator Alpha Omega world without end.

Balance in nature isn’t a smooth, linear, ongoing thing and examples of populations going completely bonkers abound. Left to their own devices, most living things will completely eat up everything in sight and move on to the next meal. Without some predator working to control those populations, things get wildly out of balance quickly.

White-tailed deer for example whose population has increased 1,000-fold in under 100 years. We wiped out the natural predators of white-tailed deer without picking up the slack. Now, along with deer eating people’s prize-winning roses, we have a sharp increase in deer ticks and Lyme disease.

That’ll teach us.

Or not.

We have been bad news for most larger predators throughout the world. Wolves, bears, the big cats, even coyotes, and foxes have to work hard to keep eating and stay ahead of our destruction of habitat. In fact, all the big mammals are taking a beating from our outsized effect on the environment. And sometimes that beating takes the shape of overpopulation that leads to disease and imbalance as in the case of white-tailed deer.

But who’s taking us out?

Once upon a time in the distant past, we were vulnerable mammals ourselves and things weren’t looking great for us back then. Not only could any number of big predators eat us for lunch, drastic climate change was also a huge threat with alternating centuries of ice ages, flooding, massive tectonic shifts, and unchecked wildfires successfully countering our reproductive brilliance.

As things on the global scale calmed down, we came through that holocaust gifted with enormous brains and unmatched abilities to adapt. Without predation and lots of volcanic activity to keep us in check, this population has gotten seriously out of balance.

There are over 7,000,000,000 of us, eating and using and taking and cutting down and plowing under and not being great at thinking about the future.

What’s to be done?

We can always hope for a really efficient pandemic and that’s not out of the question. According to an article in The Guardian from this past September:

“The first annual report by the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board, an independent group of 15 experts convened by the World Bank and WHO after the first Ebola crisis, describes the threat of a pandemic spreading around the world, potentially killing tens of millions of people, as “a real one”.”

And, who knows, that could happen. It might be a little too efficient, however, and that would be such a drag. As modern humans are the mammalian equivalent of cockroaches, I have no fear that the species will be completely eradicated (sorry everything else on the planet), but it would be beyond ugly.

Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, k?

We will always have war

Again, this isn’t a foolproof way to control population as is abundantly clear from history books to the front page of The Times. But let’s remember that finding and maintaining balance is never an exact science. Thanks to loads of testosterone and the lack of impulse control in young men, it appears we’ll continue doing our best to eradicate ourselves through war and intra-species violence.

And isn’t that just so damned tragic?

Generation after generation lines up to march off to someone else’s backyard to blow shit up and kill people without ever apparently learning that the people sending them to do this are lying. If we didn’t learn our lesson from the Battle of the Somme, I don’t think we’re ever going to back off from our determination to wipe ourselves out.

Not that we’ll be successful, mind you.

We breed like rabbits but worse

What we don’t manage in terms of quantity we more than make up for in terms of keeping offspring alive to the point of breeding themselves. We invest heavily in keeping those babies alive and thriving. And it’s certainly working (see 7,000,000,000+ above).

So we’re bringing more hungry little lives into the world than are being taken out by all the factors in play, disease and war and natural disasters and murder and mayhem and bad teeth.

At some point, there will be a correction and it’s going to be magnificently horrible. Wouldn’t it be so amazing if we, as a species, could wake up and take a different path? Really ditch the entire fossil fuel mess and change our limited little vision of our place in the world. We aren’t Italians and Ghanaians and Russians and Swiss and Chileans and Canadians and Japanese and Americans.

We’re humans and we’re stuck here together

We might figure that out before nature takes her usual course of wiping out nuisance populations but I’m not optimistic. I’ve trod this path before and I probably will come at the subject from other angles going forward. It’s something I think about a lot.

Who takes out the most successful apex predator in the history of the planet? And does it have to come to that?

Maybe our little choices won’t help but they can reset our values and until we value life and autonomy and dignity and the well-being of our fellow creatures over getting more money and that killer red Lamborgini we’re going down.

We won’t be missed.

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