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hello and welcome to technically speaking where scientists and Engineers come together to chat about common interest share knowledge and satisfy some curiosity I'm Antonia and I'm joined by Jasmine and Ellie to talk about humans and whether they are the apex predator Jasmin you suggested this topic you said you listened to a podcast and thought it would make a fun discussion yeah so I was listening to a podcast by the guardian and they had on a scientist who' recently published some
work on some research that they' done comparing responses of different animals at a watering Hall in Africa so they played clips of different noises they did typical predator noises like lion roaring other animals that you would find in the savannah and the interesting thing result is the sound that made the most animals run away but also made the animals run away in the quickest time was actually human human noises one conclusion you could draw from that research is that humans are the apex
predator because um animals are just scared of us more than a lion and I thought what was interesting was they compared humans talking versus Humans hunting so they had gunshots and dogs barking and it was the talking that got them more scared yeah well if you can hear humans talking there's a chance that you can run away before they shoot you if you hear a gunshot it's a bit too late you usually indicate someone's been shot H so Ellie as a animal lover and a
zoologist graduate what's your take on this having humans as the apex predator makes sense in a lot of ways but also in a lot of ways we're really not I think there's so many animals that are far far better suited to being uh the apex predator of their environments which we're going to definitely talk more about I think that is interesting what you said about the Savannah uh like fear response uh from animals but I think it also shows how smart they are like
they've clearly leared that this sort of foreign enemy in their environment is worth staying away from and potentially if they you know they hear the noises they hear the voices they leg it they've survived then for another day and then who's to say that they haven't snuck around behind your vehicle or your you know party and they're going to now you know take you drag you off into the bush because they've learned you know about everything like that so I think it's
really interesting and I think largely I probably hold the position that we are not the apex predator but I'm interested to discuss it more okay early conclusions you said something rather specific there ear about being the apex predator of their environment could you expand on that more yeah so we should probably Define what we mean by apex predator in the first place so I would say that an apex predator is an animal that has no natural predators of their own in their environment and therefore
is at the top of the food train so they're like the highest in terms of these what we call like trophic levels everyone gets taught in school you know the grass is one level and then the little mouse eats the grass and then the apex predator in that instance could be like a barn owl that would come in and eat the mouse and that's like very basic each stage of the trophic levels yeah so op predators are at the top and there's nothing above them what about Predator
themselves though again in those trophic levels it gets more complicated like the more you learn you learn that okay the mouse is eaten by the barn owl but the mouse is also eaten by something like a fox or something I'm trying to think of something else that would eat a mouse and then be eaten again do you see what I mean maybe like a vulture cuz is that kind of a scavenger yeah I guess so so if it was a bigger animal would go back to the Savannah let's say a lion killed
a Antelope but each equally a leopard could have killed that antelope or a leopard would then come and scavenge or a hyena would come and scavenge and then vultures would kry in so it's much much more interconnected and there's much more instead of just one thing eats another thing eats another thing there's branches and webs coming out of all these levels so a predator can be eating another animal in that ecosystem but it doesn't necessarily mean that another
animal isn't going to come and eat it if it gets a chance or that there isn't more things at play and any like lots of predators you read in the textbooks oh Lions e Antelope but Lions will probably eat anything they can get their hands on if it's worth it or if it's injured or you know whatever so there's more more Nuance to it there do you think hunting specifically is a predator um Behavior because you know we talked about some of the other animals that might happen to
eat something because it's already dead yeah but were they NE necessarily a predator or are they just a carnival or an omnivore in Zoology terms I would say Predators usually would hunt and kill their prey items like a a vulture I wouldn't technically class as a predator because it's a scavenger first and foremost it's not actively killing another creature they're are like animals who are omnivores but they don't hunt they just scavenge so like panda bears no one would say they're a
predator but they are omnivos and if they do come across like a dead animal they will eat it yeah lots of animals are opportunistic so if they find something that's already dead pigs as well they'll eat other dead pigs if there just happens to be a dead pig yeah but we also think about Predators as kind of aggressive animals does that also include organisms that I might kill but not necessarily eat what they've killed we were considering how mosquitoes are great at carrying disease
but I don't think they're trying to kill people to eat but they kind of feed off them I know what you mean there's an interesting one about mosquitoes because yes by carrying malaria and other diseases they kill far more people per year than a lion or a shark or anything like that but in terms of how we defined apex predator lots of things eat mosquitoes bats Birds geckos lizards all things like that so I in terms of numbers of death they're probably easily the highest but in terms of being an
apex predator I don't think you could pass them in the same way because they get eaten probably all the time well largely and also they don't live very long I feel like they're just not they're not as cool as like a polar bear or a great white shark or something like that like you have to have a bit of badass part of your persona I reckon to be a true apex predator and a mosquito is just like I could I could kill a mosquito it surely can't be apex predator it's deadly but not a predator
not because it's a mosquito more because like like it just happens to carry around something that can kill lots of people yeah exactly it's a it's a byproduct like rats and the black plague yeah exactly like rats realistically I could probably kill a rat if I had to I wouldn't want to but yeah the black pig it was just because it was it was on the fleas wasn't it or something yeah it's on the fleas yeah which again is like the mosquito thing like tiny insects transmitting diseases that lots of
people doesn't mean they're apex predators they're just annoying so talking about if you had to kill a m you probably could there Comes This like argument of hierarchy like at what point would you say is a cut off that you could beat another animal if you had to about humans what you reckon you could kill another person I mean people do kill other people so I mean yeah it's like strength isn't it because there's no way I'm beating a tiger a polar bear a great white shark I've just I'm
instantly me on my own in their environment I've I've got no chance but what about our environment what's our environment then is it the Bill's environment well I think if I had a great white shark in the streets of Cambridge I'd probably be okay I think I might win that one just walk away but even a polar bear even a polar bear in Cambridge I don't think I I wouldn't win you just wait but it's like why people panic when like stuff escapes from zoos and circuses because realistically they
could kill you even in your village or your environment so sounds like we're not the apex predator in that case but then I guess you have to bring in like intelligence into it as well because killer whales are crazy intelligent but then in the same way humans have used their own intelligence to create things like guns and knives and nuclear weapons or even just traps yeah so then if you're arming me with some I mean I don't because I would have no idea how to use it but if you're
arming me against a polar bear with a gun I'm going to have more of a chance don't they yeah but I would add that killer whales are also like massive really strong and really fast and have really sharp teeth all of that is true yeah I'm not beating a Killa whale especially in the water I don't think my gun will work I don't know anything about guns based on brute strength you're not beating a killow whale cuz it will it just has to sit on you and you're dead what like squash ability is
now a factor yep but it's all this is like common right you're seeing the theme between all these apex predators is that they're larger equipped to kill things they've got big teeth they've got big claws they've got muscle they're really strong they've got more intelligence like it it you can see it mapped out across you know the Arctic the Jungle the Savannah it becomes becomes easy to see why these animals are at the top of the food chain so what you used to eat humans a lot of animals
yeah but is there any like animal which evolved to eat us as a species and they kind of expect it or do you think we wiped them all out we basically wiped them all out cuz we invented weapons so like things that did hunt us we either killed them to Extinction or made sure that they knew to be scared of us yeah I think that's true like we wiped out wolves from the UK and bears and bears and lyns which I don't think necessarily lyns would have taken a human but it
would have taken a small child a small child would taken a small child if it got to us before we became big enough yeah before you reached adulthood could have taken you also like large birds of prey like can genuinely like pick up a small child cuz that does happen cuz they can also pick up small dogs I think small dogs are still smaller than most human children though yeah small dogs is quite common like chihuaha a baby but not you know the large Eagles that were in um Lord of the
Rings no I mean if they existed they could like definitely hunt humans oh there was a large Eagle that existed in uh the fossil record it's really cool oh I can't remember what it was called but it had like a 12ft wingspan or something so like it was really big wow really big uh and I think we like when we wrote the article I think we theorized that it probably could have lifted Frodo Frodo is really small though yeah well true but we need it to lift Gandalf and then we can say yes it can lift
humans yeah hang on this is it a 60,000 year old eagle with three meter wingspan probably could have lifted broo so it's not realistically it's not even that long ago 60,000 years yeah 9.8 ft if anyone who prefers feet to meters we can all agree that dinosaurs at least a predatory dinosaurs if they exist coexisted with humans they definitely would have hunted us and we would have been easy pre because we're so small well and slow and we have no weapons I think they say the only thing
you can out compete an animal on is stamina because we're really slow across short distances compared to most of the animal kingdom we're terrible at climbing compared to most of the animal kingdom we can't fly we can't fly and we can't really swim that far realistically but the only thing we can do well is run long distances slowly so like our stamina compared to pretty much anything else like people do ultramarathons and Ultra Ultra marathons because we're
really good at running slowly for a long time like you can obviously you have to train but that's like inbuilt into people is that because we're like we're a migratory species evolutionary wise yeah I don't know really where that comes from I think probably the lack of being good anything else that was what was left over I thought we it was just our big brains that helped us compared to any phys other physical attribute I think the brain does help but you need
other physical attributes cuz otherwise you're still going to be easy PR I mean the brain has led to the invention of you know all these weapons and complex technologies that would help you in that situation so definitely can't count out intelligence yeah yeah for sure yeah so talking about our big brains and our ability to create things we've also managed to create quite a lot of weaponry and you said earlier we wiped out quite a few species in the UK I think you also had the statistic about
how what percentage of like species we've wiped out or made extinct so the exact figure is pretty difficult because when you need when you talk about percentage of species one key component is how many species there are and we're always discovering new species every single year so that makes it really difficult to actually quantify and some figures have it that we've actually killed species that we've didn't actually know existed so quite difficult but there's some estimates for like
different types of species I'm just going to go off of what a un report has found in terms of like species that are now threatened with Extinction rather than made extinct for a bit more certainty currently there are over 157,000 species that are at the risk of Extinction including 41% of amphibians 37% of sharks and and Rays 36% of reef building corals this includes like nonanimal species 26% of mammals and 12% of birds is it bad that I thought that would be higher which is terrible some
figures do have it higher it depends a lot on how you want to count species yeah Fair another source said there's around 1 million animal plant species that are now threaten with Extinction within the next it also depends on like what time frame you're considering so if you like consider a shorter time period then it's going to be smaller number then if you consider like decades yeah yeah absolutely across the world we've caused a lot of issues in terms of like
wiping out species like cuz we killed foxes not foxes wolves Bears all that sort of thing that were like a threat to us but then also we like ate a lot of stuff to Extinction as well didn't we cuz we like ate the dodo to Extinction we didn't eat it to Extinction when humans first arrived in Australia there were giant sloths basically because we destroyed their habitat they're now extinct but we now have their smaller cousin the regular sloth it's like new Zealand as well isn't it like those
island nations you can see there's no apex predator on New Zealand because they evolved in isolation all the flightless birds yeah exactly flightless birds they didn't need to fly to get away from predators so they became flightless which is I mean now terrible because we've introduced rats and cats and all of that sort of thing and they get wiped out but is so fascinating in terms of the ecology because there isn't a big predatory animal that was going around eating all these things so they
didn't have that sort of evolutionary arms race to develop defenses to get away from them and now all the little kiwis are small and defenseless but so so cute and the Wombats and the koalas although they're not Birds but all these differen as cute animals that have no Predator what the Tasmanian Dev will be counted as a predator cuz I think they hunt they'll be like the closest thing to an apex predator that is a good question I don't know off the top of my head what their diet would be they're
quite small is the only thing they are small but they're ferocious I think they probably eat mice and rats and birds eggs and stuff like that but I I couldn't tell you for sure but yeah it's what eats them right so what's going to eat a tasan devil and I I don't think there's much what's the biggest thing in New Zealand I would kind of assume it'd be whatever's the biggest in New Zealand uh seals probably in terms of body mass uh but on land nothing there well now
there's possums which are pest but there's nothing there's nothing big in New Zealand I love how small everything is I mean I guess it makes sense for a small island to not have been big enough to build such an animal yeah there's like a thing it might even just be called Island Theory but it's very much so that either everything in your Island goes tiny or everything in your Island goes big it's like a weird biological phenomenon but yeah you can see how having no apex predators just makes you
defenseless because you why would you waste the energy on like defending why would you then select for that because it's not increasing your survival so you just you'd eventually just phase out so if everything TS towards to get bigger what happened to The Woolly Mammoth cuz you'd think that they like had a lot of natural defense against a the cold and then anything trying to eat it I feel like would just get hair just stuck in their teeth and probably just Tangled
and then you know by that point the Woodly mmth has probably run off I don't actually know really what happened to the Woodly mammoth did we as a prehistoric human race kill it off because things like big big animals that aren't predators are interesting like elephants as a closest living relative to mammoths they are not Predators because they eat largely leaves and berries and bark and that sort of thing but they are massive so then you have a natural inbuilt
defense because you're three times 10 times 20 times big than things that are going to eat you but then also that's where like pack hunting comes in so like a lion alone wouldn't take on an elephant or a giraffe necessarily but a pack or a pride of lions would potentially take an older giraffe or a more injured giraffe because then the odds are more in their favor I'd be surprised if Lions would take an elephant but then if it was old and on its way out anyway they could just Badger it
until it collapsed I suppose exhaustion is a technique that lots of animals use especially wolves they will run an animal into the ground because they've got the STA so yeah I think those are interesting penguins and seals are more agile than a killow whale would be especially in water and that's probably their biggest offense is that they are smaller but quicker and so if they could get to an iceberg or get to land they'd have more of a chance exhaustion can be
a thing and also killer whales are so clever that they would like so around it on an iceberg and then it would be scared and panic and all the rest of it I suppose those kind of creatures have benefit from being on land as well as in Sea whereas the killer whale is just in the sea there's a reason seals breed on land right because the pups are so vulnerable that having them on land would take them away from something like a kill a whale so cuz we're causing climate change and it's exhausting
habitats does that make us apex predator because we've basically used the exhaustion to an High Extreme I mean we're wiping out habitats we're killing stuff anyway we have lots of weapons and means to destroy land and people and animals on that land so I mean yeah you could definitely argue you could definitely argue that and we have accelerated climate change to ridiculous levels like humans the human race is to blame for that so yeah I think in terms of wiping stuff out we are probably
probably the worst ones aren't we bigger than the asteroid do you think o space is the apex predator no one saw that one coming I would argue that the asteroid was chance in the same way that getting malaria by mosquito is sort of chance because that asteroid is not actively hunting the human race I mean maybe it was sent by aliens who knows but you know that was just unfortunate Cosmic incident rather than an apex predator wiping them out but if you're talking
about Extinction on a huge level then that asteroid is surely surely at the top of the list in one single blow do you think there is another Predator waiting out in space for us though ooh could be why not it might not be big but again I know we kind of ruled out small creatures and Oran organisms being apex predators cuz they're not trying to kill us but what if they create such uninhabitable space for us that they overtake our planet or something you mean like zombie sort of Last of Us
style something escapes from a lab and wipes out everyone and takes over and then the planet becomes uninhabitable yeah how long could we last before we wiped ourselves out if we are positioning human race as the apex predator of Earth do we like eventually we wipe out everything else right by greed or you know human population is so large we need crops we need food blah blah blah we wipe out everything let's say eventually do we just destroy ourselves should we leave it there I think maybe we
should yeah did we come to a conclusion about if a human is or isn't the apex predator I'm still on no but I think I'm an optimist or mainly on the side of the animals but there we go that's all we have time for thanks for listening the views expressed in this podcast belong entirely to the person that said them they did not represent any industry or organization if you enjoyed listening to these views it would really help us out if you could rate US leave a review and tell a friend
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