'I think this article was misleading by confusing killing and predating (kill and ingest food),' he wrote in an email.įor the most part, we're not killing wildlife to eat them. However, Bonhommeau disagrees with the assessment that humans are super-predators, which he interprets as a conflation with the term 'top-predator.' (The authors of the Science paper were not available for comment.) In ecology, predator has a specific definition: they eat what they kill. 'If you take into account how wide our impact on wildlife is, it's huge,' Bonhommeau said. They found that humans kill adult prey at rates up to 14 times higher than other predators. In a 2015 report published in the journal Science, scientists at the University of Victoria in Canada compared the activity of human hunters and fishers with that of other terrestrial and marine predators.

Some scientists argue that humans' pressure on other species makes us 'super predators,' a term the authors coined to refer to the rate at which humans kill other species. Of course, humans pose a much larger threat to other animals than anchovies and pigs do. Meanwhile, those in Iceland, where the diet consisted of around 50% meat that same year, had a trophic level of 2.57. In Burundi, for instance, plants made up 96.7% of the local diet in 2009, giving those in that country a trophic level of 2.04.

But humans' trophic levels vary worldwide.

That puts us at an average trophic level of 2.21 - somewhere between anchovies and pigs. They found that, on average, humans get 80% of their daily calories from plants and 20% from meat and fish, according to the team's 2013 study results, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Using data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations on human food consumption around the world, the IFREMER scientists assigned a trophic level to each food we eat.

Little big planet levels