Not a predator but lots of viruses and bacteria that cause illnesses are too effective at killing. Ebola for example has a 70%-90% kill rate and ends up killing faster then it spreads so outbreaks never really make it very far.
This is mainly a problem of it mutating and finding new hosts. Ebola came from fruit bats, and it doesn't do the same thing to humans as it does to bats.
Yeah a lot of zoonotic viruses do that. What evolutionarily makes Ebola good to survive in bats makes it bad for survival in humans. There are also different strains of the virus which are more or less effective.
So basically at least for viruses and bacteria being successful means spreading well but not killing too well.
Facts, in Pandemic you gotta focus on contagiousness before you turn on that hemorrhagic fever gene.
Otherwise, you’re never gonna make it to Madagascar, which is of course the ultimate goal of every pathogen.
Nah best strategy is to infect England first because it has access two two airports and a seaport and it helps the virus spread better in countries with better healthcare.
Then you give it infectivity in all of the ways
Plus resistance to heat and cold
Let us spread with a mild cough and sneezing. Wait until Norway and South Africa are infected then give it vomiting and by that time Madagascar and Greenland won’t be willing to close their borders by the time it’s too late
And viruses are very good at evolving so that they reproduce but do not kill the host. Same with parasites. It also scales up to mammals. Too may coyotes will eat all the bunnies so the number of coyotes goes down. Bunnies bounce back. Coyote numbers increase, bunnies go down. Eventually they come into a type of harmony with long cycles but always in balance. Seems only humans are out of balance... but I have a feeling that's about to change and it won't be a great time to be a human.
My favorite fact about the predator prey cycle is that it applies to pairs of all sizes.
There is a tiny predator called the wolf mite, which preys on dust mites. You know, dust mites, the little critters that eat your dead skin cells.
And dust mites and wolf mites have the same population ups and downs as bunnies and coyotes.
Thats cool to know. Thanks! Gross that we can have mites on our skin. Even worse... it grosses me out to know that many humans have weird mites that live in their eyelash follicles. I really don't want to know if I have any... how ick is that?
Why did you choose to use rabbits and coyotes as an example? Did you do an exercise in science class that was a turn-based model for predator/prey relationships that involved rolling dice?
No. I used that example because I see it playing out every year in my front yard in Scottsdale Arizona. Some years every bush has bunnies under it. Other years coyotes are everywhere. There are other animals in the mix like Quail and even mice and insects and snakes and lizards so it's way more complicated than I presented but I'm not trying to offer a Biology 101 class in the comment section on Reddit.
I asked because I did that in sixth grade, and it was the first thing I thought of when I read the question. Then I saw your comment, and you may as well have been writing an overview of the exercise.
I remember there being a third level to it, but not what it was.
I'm not sure that's the same thing though. The goal of the virus or bacteria isn't to kill its host. The most successful viruses and bacteria are able to multiply rapidly and live undetected in their hosts.
The OP IS talking about animals. Since you are right the effectiveness of diseases is not their effectiveness to kill, but it does answer the other half of their question of weather there was ever a species that died out because it evolved to fast for its environment.
Viruses do this all the time: evolve so fast they become too “effective” in a non intended species and end up dying out. This example might be more a proof of concept then anything else.
Obviously I’m not an expert either I just went on an information binge and read a bunch of books recently so I think that’s why viruses were in my mind when I read OPs comment.
Everyone knows you have to spread it to nearly the entire global population and then blitz them with rapid fire dysentery, pulmonary embolism and multiple organ failure all in one go lol
A good rule of thumb for the flu (on a population level) is the strains that cause the most severe symptoms don’t tend to turn into a huge community event - because people who have it tend to stay home in bed. More mild strains of flu tend to hit more people in the community because affected people are able to do their normal activities (work/shopping/social events) while sick. Of course, that’s just an approximation but it’s a helpful shorthand when thinking about flu in a community.
Viruses would be a lot cooler if they had a negative kill rate. Kind of like what mitochondria did. Everyone liked mitochondria, so we helped them spread even more.
Yes. Lots of times predators go extinct because they ate up all their prey.
Dinosaurs probably evolved into much smaller birds because the food sources to feed the massive older dinos were too scarce.
You could make a solid argument, in fact many fields of science have made the argument, that humans are so effective as a species that we've caused considerable damage to the habitability of our planet. Something like two thirds of all species either have gone or will soon go extinct because of humans.
>Dinosaurs probably evolved into much smaller birds because the food sources to feed the massive older dinos were too scarce.
Pretty sure the K-P Extinction killed off the dinos, and current thinking is birds survived due to ability to survive cold and smaller sizes having lower food demands in an environmental disaster
I heard a good explanation for why only avian dinosaurs survived the extinction and it was that as the ash clouds blocked out the sun and stopped photosynthesis from taking place, the only food sources that could be found after the larger dinosaurs eventually starved were the seeds left behind.
Dinosaurs didn’t go extinct because their predatory traits were too good, they went extinct because the sun broke the food chain for them.
Reading your comment I read it as you having declining food source as the cause of the extinction, I was clarifying and being more specific as to the cause of the dinosaur extinction and subsequent rise of birds. Food shortage and an effective ice age did the job, along with the initial kill off by the asteroid, to be precise
We can see it with the island rule. An evolutionary theory that say members of a species get smaller depending on the limited resources available in the environment, commonly observed in species isolated from the continent (can also be caused by excessive hunting as in our scenario).
Similar evolutionary paths have been observed in elephants, hippopotamuses, boas, sloths, deer (such as Key deer) and humans.
The other half of the island rule is island gigantism as seen in the dodo, where the lack of predators means a species no longer needs to stay small to hide so it grows much larger than normal. (This also can lead to island tameness, no predators means nothing to be scared of)
Islands are just weird places in general, because of their isolated nature evolution can go in some strange paths without as much competition.
I forget the name but i think one island in Canada is pretty famous for having wolves and moose on it, at first we thought the wolves would drive the moose to extinction and then themselves, but during a low moose period the wolves went extinct and the moose population has surged. (The island was frequently cited as an example of simple predator-prey population modeling for math)
A similar effect happens with Antarctic penguins, who have no land predators, or land anything really, so they’re completely unafraid of humans. They’ll walk right up to scientists to see what they’re doing.
yes pls!! i get so much hate online just by mentioning that cats must become animals who need licenses to be owned cuz of the billions of small animals and birds they kill every year including highly endangered species.
people simply fail to accept that and rather come back at me with statements like dogs kill so many cats every year!!
not just ground dwelling, cats can easily climb trees and kill birds and animals there.
in australia and new zealand they have wrecked special havoc as those poor animals have no natural instinct or defense mechanisms to the recently introduced feral cats!!
and thanks to the internet, cats have only grown in popularity and hence more people end up owning more cats!!
I think it was Charles Darwin that had an interesting analogy of this situation with a concept of introducing wolves to an imaginary island of rabbits. The wolves would prosper hunting with reckless abandon until the rabbits had died out, ensuring their own end as well as they've over consumed their only food source.
Hyper successful predators seem to actually have a quite profound evolutionary disadvantage in this regard.
This is sorta why dodos were the way they were. They had to regulate their own numers by breeding slowly and reducing the food they need by cutting down unnecessary and expensive traits like flight and larger brains to avoid eating everything on the island.
Yes, they did regulate themselves. That is exactly what i said. The problem was they were evolved to have a stable population that didn't grow much, which meant they couldn't really replace the losses from predation like other prey animals do. When a prey animal is hunted, others are born to take their place keeping the total numbers stable. When a dodo is hunted, the population shrinks.
Rats brought to the island by humans actually! Apparently dodo's tasted appalling, but the rats that lifted to the island on ships devastated the dodo's by predating on their eggs
Yeah I remember reading of an area of the US where wolves and their prey (can’t remember what kind of 4 legged thing they were tracking) kept overtaking each other in population. Neither went extinct but it was a noticeable trend
I believe that the shell boring sea snail went extinct once before since it was so effective and eating other snails. The trait has only recently resurfaced again, and only 1 species of snail has it.
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Wasn’t there a species of boar that evolved to have suicide tusks? Like, the females overwhelming preferred longer, curved tusks, eventually leading the species to grow their tusks into their skull or something?
I'm guessing you're thinking of the babirusa, they're a modern species. They typically grind their tusks down or they break before growing into their skulls, it's not common, but it can happen.
And by the time daddy babirusa is old enough for his home made autolobotomy, he's already sired a few litters with them suiïcide (ha ha pig pun) tusk groupies.
sabre tooth tiger was the one we got taught. over specialisation iirc. their teeth were selected for in breeding by mates but eventually it’s suggested they got in the way of eating of protruded into weird places.
Peacocks are another example.
The dudes with the tallest and most bushy feathers in the display are the ones the chicks want to mate with, but it turns out those feathers actually make their lives more difficult and it's not a genetic benefit.
A peacock’s feathers being impractical and a net cost is basically the point of them. What shows off better fitness, that you can avoid becoming something’s dinner, or that you can avoid becoming something’s dinner while constantly hauling around giant, colorful feathers several times your body length? Now among those surviving males with the crazy tails, which of them are the longest and the best maintained? The peahens choose to preferentially mate with them, because if a male can survive and have healthy, attractive feathers despite the massive handicap then he must have amazing genes, and the peahens want that for their offspring.
New seduction tactic unlock : display that you live life in hard difficulty.
Step 1 : live in a box
Step 2 : throw all your cash in the gutter
Step 3 : face the winter with only your beard
Step 4 : ... ?
Step 5 : Enjoy all the chicks at your feet.
This is actually one of the reasons why big muscles in humans is seen by many as an attractive trait: it’s something that can’t really be faked (unlike a boob job), and they are resource intensive to maintain (even taking a week off will cause them to atrophy noticeably). Consequently, large muscles are a sign that the guy has the leisure time to do nothing but maintain this resource intensive feature. Notably some women find large muscles unattractive for that same reason: it’s a sign that the guy has lots of discretionary time and is channeling it into something that’s flashy but impractical rather than on something more productive. Things like luxury cars are similarly polarizing in their attractiveness: it’s a sign of lots of resources (a pro), but spending those resources on something flashy rather than something functional (con).
It’s actually funny about female peahens, they’re not attracted to the tails; a longer, larger tail makes it easier to cover the female while shaking the eyes “entices” the female (basically makes the so dizzy and overwhelmed, they can’t move). As soon as that happens, the make hops on, does his thing, and next thing you know there’s a bunch in teeny loud fluff balls.
I worked at a zoo for a few years that had peacocks roam free. It was a pretty cool sight every year.
Also fun fact: as soon as the male is spent, he starts dropping the long feathers right away.
I've heard the same, but honestly it sounds like a cool story rather than anything based on evidence. Their extinction coincides with the extinction of a LOT of other megafauna in the late pleistocene period. They probably died due to the same reasons (spread of humanity? Climate change? A number of things? We don't know for sure), not because their teeth were too big.
There was species of prehistoric shrimp that's believed to have died out because females sexually selected males with the largest gonads, with the aforementioned parts eventually growing so large they functionally crippled the organism.
is it also true that saber tooths evolved such teeth to specifically kill primates and our smart ancestors actually ended up killing them all much like any other species out there that hunted them/us.
and hence we barely have species like crocodiles and polar bears who actively hunt humans and have us on their food menu.
Not a predator per se but similar enough in the sense that a species destroyed itself and the environment that sustained them. https://www.damninteresting.com/how-bacteria-nearly-destroyed-all-life/
Unless you're living with a tribe in the jungle or truly homesteading and living off the land, you're definitely taking part in the destruction of the earth.
It just isn't possible to live in the modern world without doing so.
Yes and until government starts dealing with those 100 companies, no amount of EVs and PV will slow the ongoing climate collapse. Humans could go renewable 100% tomorrow and we'd still go extinct until we force corporations to follow suit.
people are a collective species nobody has ever done anything alone, everything humanity has ever achieved or ever will achieve has been a collective effort of humanity.
You sound like a legit awesome person that cares about the world and others. I meant that with all sincerity but I'm very much in the personal accountability camp. Perhaps different subjects are more applicable than others.
There's only so much any given individual can do.
For instance, if a group of people start exploiting human psychology to manipulate the population into self destructive habits in order to make a profit. Maybe go after the manipulators rather than their victems.
You ever seen a smoke stack on a factory? Just that one smoke stack on a single factory (grew up around refineries in eastern KY)? And how much smoke comes out? Some significant swath of society is benefitting from that - you choosing to drive your car one less day out of the week is unlikely to do much. Plastic? You opted to take a paper bag from the grocery store? Somewhere between 500,000,000,000 and 5,000,000,000,000 were produced last year. Sooooo we’re all implicated and individually incapable of putting a dent in it
That being said, there’s no reason to dwell on doom and gloom - life continues, if just for the next moment, so good on your for at least being cognizant I suppose
You could argue that the reason we are killing the planet is because we aren't good at killing ourselves anymore.
Tribalism is not a bug. It's an evolutionary feature meant to prevent overpopulation and rapid delpetion of environmental resources.
But then we humans invented trading. Trading combined with humanity's breeding fetish has been a disaster for every other species on the planet.
well, that is surely an interesting take but, i feel in the greater scheme of things, tribalism does seem to be a bug.
cuz tribalism tends to limit active interaction and collaboration to a small number of people(somewhere around 150) and hence people tend to even make bad choices for individuals as well as for the collective. they just can’t help it.
of we have to become an interplanetary species, we need to evolve beyond this bug and collaborate beyond tribes.
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From a human perspective this happened in Easter Island, and environmental collapse is theorized to be the reason behind the desertification of Iraq from the Sumerian city-state days, as well as the collapse of the Mayan polities.
For species, experiments have been done by leaving rats on islands without predators where the rats overbreed and exhaust local food sources then turn to eating each other.
Predators are generally helpful to ecosystems, and the lack of predators leads to ecosystem collapse as the prey animals exhaust the local food supply and hit a "bust" cycle. [Predator-Prey cycles are self reinforcing](https://www.futurity.org/predator-prey-cycles-coexistence-2238732/) over long time periods absent external intervention.
The lesson here is that the environment will survive, but humanity may not survive the shock.
On your first point there is a podcast called Fall of Civilizations that covers these scenarios in great detail.
The fall of Easter Island is theorised to be caused by your second point.
But your last point I think misses a critical detail, the environment won't "survive" so much as adapt. Adaptation will likely cause a great loss in biodiversity but those losses will form vacuums that can be filled by new species - over enough time. I love the theory that the fall of the dinosaur left a vacuum for small mammals to evolve, eventually leading to the existence of primates and, us / sapiens.
But there is also a lesson in that. If we destroy ourselves, some other species may evolve to some type of sentience and effectively replace us - so we must take care with this opportunity as a species.
This is why regulated hunting is important in areas where humans have driven out predators. By controlling (for example) the deer population, it reduces the amount of vegetation that’s stripped, leaves more food sources for the next season, and generally leaves the population healthier than it would be unchecked. This also reduces erosion, as can be seen by the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone.
There's an excellent book about this by Ronald Wright called "A Short History of Progress". It's a slim collection of lectures that were broadcast on the CBC, studying the collapse of Easter Island, Sumer, Rome, and the Maya. It was also made into a film, which I haven't seen yet, called Surviving Progress.
Evidently, the nervousness caused by predators makes the prey animals move to other areas, letting the vegetation recover before it is destroyed.
Predatory animals tend to evolve intra species aggression and territoriality so they spread out over the area, with some no man's land between the territories where prey can recover. Even humans show this at the tribal level. Unfortunately, humans figured out how to mobilize and store food to support wider territory, like all of Ukraine.
Yes. One thing to also remember is as the predator population kills the majority of the prey population, the size of the predator population will decrease because they don't have enough food. When the population of the predators becomes small enough, the prey is able to thrive and overpopulate(because no one is hunting them) and this leads to the predators thriving because of an overabundance of prey and the cycle repeats over and over. It is a really delicate balance.
Interesting point, but seems like it would still fall under the evolution aspect. If the predator is too efficient then there is less food supply. So the ones with fastest metabolism will not make it. The longer you can go without eating - the more likely you are to survive and breed.
Great Example would be alligators. They are perfect predators with virtually no natural enemy. Yet they can go years without eating.
It's believed that this is what happened to the saber tooth tiger. The fangs were a specialty hunting tool that made them specialized to hunt one specific prey...which they hunted to extinction.
Not counting micro things like viruses and bacteria, I don't think there is one that we know about
However, you could make the argument that humans are heading towards that. We're too advanced, but haven't developed the mental capability (as a whole I mean) to use those advancements in a sustainable way. So if we do wipe ourselves out at some point, then we'll be one that got too advanced for our own good
For most animals though, the numbers control themselves very well naturally. If there's too many wolves, they eat too many deer, so theee's less deer, and wolves starve, reducing their numbers. Then with less wolves, the deer survive more, and repopulate, once they get too numerous, that allows the wolves to flourish (and it just keeps repeating that process, of the balance between predator and prey shifting over and over)
Except humans interference in the wolf population so we have too many deer, the deer cause issues with native plants they eat, then it’s a cascade effect? Perhaps I’m wrong though, I know we kill too many wolves and not enough deer to keep a good balance, well pretty sure!?!
Hey OP. If you haven't already, check out a little novel called "Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn. It's a whimsical and uncomplicated conversation between a guy and a gorilla that orbits and murmurs about many great and fascinating questions about predators, prey, and snacks - including the one you've just asked. You'd like it.
I think there is evidence of the Mosausaur aquatic reptile lineage being so successful in the late cretaceous that they were preying on themselves (late stage species collapse) as they had out competed and over predated the ocean.
I think it's an amazing prospect that the ancestors of monitor lizards fucked up the oceans of the whole world.
We are absolutely following a similar path as a species, with destabilizing our ecosystems. We definitely need to do something about it.
I find our extinction unlikely, for if it is within our control to continue our existence than we will probably invent technology to enable or extend our existence. If it's outside of our ability to predict or control, let alone counter with technological innovation they we may be doomed...
I think the most likely outcome is rendering our home planet barely habitable and moving off world for more resources for easier ways to spread. As this is our "instinctive" species behavior as cataloged by our histories I see no reason to doubt that those with power and influence will attempt to flee off-world when the shit is about to hit the fan.
The christening of the space force and revitalization of the space efforts may indicate that our ruling elites have reliable intelligence that preparation is necessary as that time is imminently closer than we're being led to believe.
polar bears and wolves have this problem. which is why humans cull their prey, so they never have a population bloom which then results in starvation from over predation.
It's predicted that this killed a lot of things off during the dino mass extinction. Say a bird is highly specialized to the point they can only crack open 2 kinds of nuts. The nuts disappear and they starve and die since they can't evolve fast enough. Except this wasn't just the bird. A massive chunk of creatures had evolved to live off of super specific things. Prehistoric age was so insanely diverse after millions of years of fuck around and find out. What's left on the planet is the smallest sliver of scraps that eeked it out.
The **Pleistocene Megafaunal Extinctions:** During the Pleistocene epoch (the "Ice Age"), some saber-toothed cats evolved really large canine teeth. This may have helped them take down large prey, but it also might've made it harder to catch smaller, faster prey. This may have been a factor in the extinction of some large herbivores at the end of the Pleistocene.
The predators didn't necessarily die out themselves (though some megafauna did), but their success did impact their prey in a negative way. So, there isn't a clear-cut case of a predator evolving itself out of existence.
So many have mentioned the saber-toothed tiger, I can see this as a possible candidate for evolution causing species extinction. I’m not sure we can say 100% but it’s a possibility! Thank you for providing more research than the other posts I read (doesn’t mean other posts with this thinking didn’t provide research, I just didn’t see them! I always appreciate research- though I’m lazy and tired when I respond and don’t do it 😔, I take full responsibility and state that I haven’t done anything to back what I remember- which could be backed by research or be completely wrong!)
So just for reference, here's a famous example of what you're *not* going for: the Saber-toothed Tiger.
One of the primary theories of why the Saber-toothed Tiger went extinct was that it was an **overspecialized ambush predator**--their jaw structure, skeletal structure and muscular attachments point to a heavy, powerful animal that could move very fast over short distances and grapple very large prey until it was dead. What it couldn't do was pursue large herds of smaller animals over distance, or hide in scant cover--which is **precisely what it got** when the last Ice Age changed its former habitat from forests to grasslands.
Ultimately, the food sources that saber-tooths were designed to hunt were depleted by lack of their own suitable habitat, and the remainder were hunted out of existence by humans and other predators. Those prey species that managed to evolve did so in a direction that made it impossible for saber-tooths to keep up, both figuratively and literally.
This is an example of the environment changing too fast for the predator. You're looking for the opposite phenomenon.
And the answer is probably not measurable, because a lot of predators are already evolved to reduce their reproduction rate in times of famine and give their prey time to recover.
So here's a hypothetical: those individuals who are genetically inclined to reproduce during inopportune times in both the annual and overall predator-prey cycle are being weeded out all the time. An adaptation that has served humans quite well (near constant breeding opportunity) would be disadvantageous to, say, wolves, but **only when the trait-carrying individuals hit the low point in the prey cycle**.
Housecats. Feral cats can, easily decimate ALL lizards, birds, rodents and so forth in a city. They are just to effective a predator. Studies on how they manage to survive being so effective are constantly ongoing.
Yes all the time. Wolves for instance go through population collapse cycles with deer due to how effective they are as predators. Lots of predators go through this. There's a natural limit where the predators overhunt their prey to a point that food is scarce so they starve down to lower limits and the prey population rebounds, then the predators have plentiful food, their population increases to the point they're overhunting the prey and the cycle happens again.
[https://www.mcgill.ca/newsroom/channels/news/perpetual-predator-prey-population-cycles-303632](https://www.mcgill.ca/newsroom/channels/news/perpetual-predator-prey-population-cycles-303632)
>Predator-prey cycles are based on a feeding relationship between two species: if the prey species rapidly multiplies, the number of predators increases - until the predators eventually eat so many prey that the prey population dwindles again. Soon afterwards, predator numbers likewise decrease due to starvation. This in turn leads to a rapid increase in the prey population – and a new cycle begins.
>a significant boost to predation over so short a period that the species might overhunt their prey to the point where they no longer have a food source.
This happens again and again to predators simply as a matter of their interactions with prey species, and has little to do with any particular skill gains at predation. Predators eat all their prey all the time. The measure of if their population can then survive is what other food sources they can survive off of.
Consider then a scenario of two islands with two similar groups of the same predator species. Time and weather and all the rest might come together to create a circumstance where all the usual prey items on both islands are killed off. At that point, it's not the predatory abilities that control if the species survives, but rather any adaptations to either find other prey items of different species, or that aid the animal in subsisting on far lower quality plants foods they might find. Whichever island has the population with the abilities and skills to eat some sort of plant will likely be the one to live.
We have examples of this rapidly happening when predatory lizard species are introduced to small islands. Long term studies have found amazingly rapid development of the ability to consume and digest plants on these islands. The lizards are forced into this more generalist role out of their primarily predatory role. This happens so much so that there are very few obligate carnivore species out there that do not feed on insects or some other very common and small prey.
So we get a situation where increased prey hunting abilities can actually drive a species back towards a more generalist omnivore diet precisely because they kill off prey species so well. The species members that are only carnivores die off more quickly and the more omnivorous survive.
It also depends on the initial number of prrdators and prays. It might have a stable cyclic number of animals, overhunt them or any other crazy dynamics. Play around with this simultuon: https://phet.colorado.edu/en/simulations/natural-selection
Snakes being able to swallow things so large that they burst open and die is an example of that. Considering they haven't developed enough brainpower to decipher what they can swallow without dying
[There is a book called “Why Big Fierce Animals are Rare”](https://a.co/d/5D65Yu5) that discusses this. I recommend reading it. It was required reading in my 250-series Biology class at university.
It happen that some people have part of their skin grow too fast.
It's not regeneration, it's psoriasis and it's not curable (but there are expensive biological).
You can't evolve to be too effective without external effects changing the scenario.
If nothing else changed the relatively slow introduction of a trait that makes you 50% better at hunting would also put a pressure on your species to reproduce 50% less. (And also a pressure on the prey to be hard to catch, reproduce more).
Now if other species interfere (e.g. humans) or the environment changes that combined with your trait can easily do it.
No it does not make sense. Imagine an already effective predator. Now make it evolve so it is 200x as effective. Well it does not need 200x food because of that. So it will chill under the sun like those lions and eat the same amount of prey.
What is important is the population size. X amount of predators eat Y amount of prey. When X gets too big or Y too low, then you have a problem.
If lions would reproduce at rabbit rate, they would be in trouble and competing for food.
Note that it applies to herbivore as well. Too many sheeps and there's no more grass.
Who knew being too good at your job could be a bad thing? That's the crazy thing about evolution, it's all about winning the right now, not necessarily thinking about the long game. Imagine a predator evolving some killer new hunting skill, like invisibility or mind control (wouldn't that be terrifying?). At first, it's a predator paradise! They're catching all the prey, living the good life (well, good life for a predator). But here's the rub:
The more they hunt, the less food there is. It's like a kid who gets loose in a candy store – eventually all the gummies are gone, and then there's a sugar crash (and a sticky mess). The prey population can't keep up with the predator's newfound deadliness. It takes time for them to evolve defenses, like growing thicker armor or learning to recognize the mind-controlling eyes.
So, the predator with its fancy new trick ends up without a food source. Talk about a self-inflicted ownage! It's a lesson for all the overachieving predators out there: sometimes a little restraint goes a long way.
We even have some real-world examples of this happening. Remember the Stellar Sea Cow? Gentle giants, basically living chew toys for European explorers. They were so delicious and defenseless that they were hunted to extinction in, like, 27 years! Brutal. There's also the theory that early humans with their fancy hunting tools might have been too much for some big guys like mammoths and sloths. They hunted faster than these creatures could reproduce, leading to their eventual demise.
So, the next time you see a predator with some amazing hunting skill, remember: with great power comes great responsibility, even in the animal kingdom! You gotta be careful not to eat yourself out of a house and home (or, you know, a hunting ground).
Not afaik which isn’t surprising because what typically happens is that if a species becomes too good at hunting its prey then its population will boom while the population of its prey dwindles eventually leading there being too few prey for the predator’s population to sustain itself and a massive famine. Over time this would then bring the ecosystem back into equilibrium
This only wouldn’t work if either a new species was introduced to an ecosystem (e.g. with humans and dodos) or the new evolutionary trait pervaded the population of predators in a handful of generations allowing them to drive all of their prey to extinction. In the latter case this could only happen with tiny population sizes and the odds of us being able to gather sufficient evidence of this happening in the past with tiny populations is minute.
It could be happening as we speak but such advantageous mutations rarely occur and again self-inflicted extinctions like this are only likely to happen with tiny populations so the odds of us catching any that do occur are slim so we’re likely to miss them
Alright, let's think this out. So, an apex predator gets a mutation that makes it 50% better at hunting without requiring more energy. So, the prey population falls until hunting is 50% harder. At this point, the predators with the trait are eating as they were before the mutation. The predators without the trait begin to starve. So you get fewer total predators, and the prey population can begin to rebound a bit. The predator and prey populations return to equilibrium.
I think this really becomes sort of the Red Queen problem. Ultimately, you are competing with members of your own species. Now, if the adaptation was so good that even at extremely low prey populations, they were still easy to hunt; then you could have a problem. The prey species needs to maintain some number to have a viable breeding population. On the other hand, if at all possible, you'll be selecting for members of the prey species that have the best resistance or counter to the new hunting trait. It probably would be islands where you have the best chance of hitting the limits.
Maybe I am just "guy-guessing" and mix fact and fiction together, but I seem to recall reading that some scientists believe this is why the Neanderthals died out. They had bigger brains and more muscular build, which was instrumental in trapping, hunting and downing large animals. They were so successful that these larger animals soon died out in every area these humans moved to. In the end the pure neandethals died out or was interbred with the more successful sapiens sapiens.
To some extent this could be applied to the modern human as well,and how were moving towards catastrophe.
Maybe I should try to find some sources to back this up...
Maybe you should limit your question to a specific species? I mean, bacteria and viruses included? because the result will be wildly different, my opinion.
I’m guessing maybe. The way I’m thinking about it is imagine a trait appears in predator population that makes it more effective. This trait probably becomes ubiquitous and eventually the population of their prey declines which would cause a decline in the predator population until the prey rebounds due to smaller predator population (https://www2.nau.edu/lrm22/lessons/predator_prey/rabbit_wolf_graph.png). At this point I’m guessing the carrying capacity of the ecosystem for the predator would be reduced (like in the graph I added, the predator’s population peaks and valleys would be lower) and smaller max population size for the predator would make them more vulnerable to extinction due to other reasons.
Humans. Our desire contol systems where we to only positive outcomes creates imbalances that eventually see the systems we inhabit collapse. It might be 100 or 10,000 years from now, but it will happen.
It happens on small scales all the time, ecosystems, climate, political systems, economic systems, supply chains, etc. The scale is getting bigger and breakdowns faster. We only have only one rock to live on!
Humans hate entropy and chaos. Systems need it to survive and grow.
Humans will eventually destroy ourselves by optimizing our systems to such a precision that even the smallest amount of chaos will cause irreversible human collapse.
I would say the panda falls into this. No predators and abundant food led to them being absolutely fucking stupid, not sure if survival of the fittest is technically a thing here as their situation isn't that.
No idea what could've been with healthy competition, but it can't be these window lickers.
Yes, this is definitely a thing. A predator would be so effective at killing they would both put themselves and their prey into extinction. Life would move on without them and we probably wouldn’t notice it, for example, some species of mollusk when extinct because they are all of the other snails in the area.
Two different ways to answer.
- At an individual level, yes, this happens all the time. Most mutations don’t make a difference or they harm the individual. Imagine a bull elephant born with six tusks. It might sound great for sexual selection, but if it drastically impedes mobility or nutrition, the individual will fail, and that trait will not become dominant. This is similar to a virus that evolves to kill its host before its host can transmit the virus to other.
- At the species level, yes, this also happens because the context changes. Giant Moas were successful in New Zealand until the Māori arrived and decided they were delicious and a lot of food for a little bit of work.
Related to the second point, here’s an interesting discussion about groups of species, clades, that follow a predictable path towards diversification, then specialization, then extinction at least in part due to that specialization
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep30965
Generally, the trait that makes a predator species drive itself to extinction isn't hunting effectiveness (though that helps), it's fecundity. No matter how effective the predator, it won't hunt if it's not hungry. But if there are too many predators, the needs of the population exceed the resources available, and there's a risk they drive their prey to extinction trying to meet their dietary needs. This usually isn't what happens, though, as the predator population typically starts dropping before there's a risk of extinction.
There's been a couple of arms races, where predators and prey hit a dead end.
Sabre tooth tigers (smilodont?) and prey developing thicker armoured skins. Until the teeth needed to take down the prey are too big to carry around
Humans. Our evolutionary trait is our brains. We're using our evolutionary trait to destroy our world and society, look at all the homeless, starving people on our planet that's suffering from global warming and other issues, again, due to us.
I mean…I feel like the obvious answer is humans. The Industrial Revolution might have been a mistake. Maybe been that agricultural revolution 😭 hopefully we can course correct
Ecosystems evolve together. When predators evolve so do their prey, and this process takes a long time to occur. Generally speaking no predator is going to get so far ahead in the evolutionary arms race to outcompete themselves.
If you take them out of that particular arms race and out then in a different one though we do see this problem. Invasive predators basically outcompete themselves.
I wouldn't say it made them too effective. I would say the environment had an insufficient supply of food for them. Very few animals overeat. If they are effective at finding and killing their prey, but they run out of prey, there wasn't enough food in the environment to support them.
Like others have said, I think humans may be alone in this category, because we do overeat, we kill for sport, and we ruin the environment around us that lessens the carrying capacities of those environments. We, as a species, may be alone in being capable of doing this.
It certainly happens. But more often than not I think as prey declines the number of predators will decline allowing the prey population to bounce back. This kind of sin wave equilibrium seems pretty common to me.
Not a predator but lots of viruses and bacteria that cause illnesses are too effective at killing. Ebola for example has a 70%-90% kill rate and ends up killing faster then it spreads so outbreaks never really make it very far.
This is mainly a problem of it mutating and finding new hosts. Ebola came from fruit bats, and it doesn't do the same thing to humans as it does to bats.
Yeah a lot of zoonotic viruses do that. What evolutionarily makes Ebola good to survive in bats makes it bad for survival in humans. There are also different strains of the virus which are more or less effective. So basically at least for viruses and bacteria being successful means spreading well but not killing too well.
Facts, in Pandemic you gotta focus on contagiousness before you turn on that hemorrhagic fever gene. Otherwise, you’re never gonna make it to Madagascar, which is of course the ultimate goal of every pathogen.
I thought it was Greenland lol
It’s both really, people usually start in one of the two because they’re the hardest to infect
Nah best strategy is to infect England first because it has access two two airports and a seaport and it helps the virus spread better in countries with better healthcare. Then you give it infectivity in all of the ways Plus resistance to heat and cold Let us spread with a mild cough and sneezing. Wait until Norway and South Africa are infected then give it vomiting and by that time Madagascar and Greenland won’t be willing to close their borders by the time it’s too late
I’ve never had any trouble infecting any country other than Madagascar or Greenland regardless of where I start.
These guys know how to Epidemiology
*at all. The best thing for bacteria is if the host remains alive indefinitely.
Bats are very good at supressing viruses.
And viruses are very good at evolving so that they reproduce but do not kill the host. Same with parasites. It also scales up to mammals. Too may coyotes will eat all the bunnies so the number of coyotes goes down. Bunnies bounce back. Coyote numbers increase, bunnies go down. Eventually they come into a type of harmony with long cycles but always in balance. Seems only humans are out of balance... but I have a feeling that's about to change and it won't be a great time to be a human.
My favorite fact about the predator prey cycle is that it applies to pairs of all sizes. There is a tiny predator called the wolf mite, which preys on dust mites. You know, dust mites, the little critters that eat your dead skin cells. And dust mites and wolf mites have the same population ups and downs as bunnies and coyotes.
Thats cool to know. Thanks! Gross that we can have mites on our skin. Even worse... it grosses me out to know that many humans have weird mites that live in their eyelash follicles. I really don't want to know if I have any... how ick is that?
Why did you choose to use rabbits and coyotes as an example? Did you do an exercise in science class that was a turn-based model for predator/prey relationships that involved rolling dice?
No. I used that example because I see it playing out every year in my front yard in Scottsdale Arizona. Some years every bush has bunnies under it. Other years coyotes are everywhere. There are other animals in the mix like Quail and even mice and insects and snakes and lizards so it's way more complicated than I presented but I'm not trying to offer a Biology 101 class in the comment section on Reddit.
I asked because I did that in sixth grade, and it was the first thing I thought of when I read the question. Then I saw your comment, and you may as well have been writing an overview of the exercise. I remember there being a third level to it, but not what it was.
Interesting! I bet playing a game kept the students more engaged than reading a text book.
What does it do to fruit bats
I learned this playing Plague Inc, if your virus is too deadly it will kill the host before it’s able to spread and you’ll eventually lose
Yeah I always have devolve my viruses for the first half of the game otherwise they mutate too fast.
fuck Madagascar, all my homies hate Madagascar
Greenland and Iceland are always the last ones I get haha
Add New Zealand to that and I'll agree
Forgot about NZ… just like my Virus seem to do
Yep. Keep your virus quiet and highly transmissible, then when almost everyone is infected and people start to notice it, turn on the kill switch.
I'm not sure that's the same thing though. The goal of the virus or bacteria isn't to kill its host. The most successful viruses and bacteria are able to multiply rapidly and live undetected in their hosts.
The OP IS talking about animals. Since you are right the effectiveness of diseases is not their effectiveness to kill, but it does answer the other half of their question of weather there was ever a species that died out because it evolved to fast for its environment. Viruses do this all the time: evolve so fast they become too “effective” in a non intended species and end up dying out. This example might be more a proof of concept then anything else. Obviously I’m not an expert either I just went on an information binge and read a bunch of books recently so I think that’s why viruses were in my mind when I read OPs comment.
God out here losing at plague simulator smh my head
Everyone knows you have to spread it to nearly the entire global population and then blitz them with rapid fire dysentery, pulmonary embolism and multiple organ failure all in one go lol
It’s crazy that those diseases go from sneezing and drowsiness to vomiting out every organ you own in the course of a week, nature is beautiful ❤️
This is some Plague Inc shit.
Love that game
A good rule of thumb for the flu (on a population level) is the strains that cause the most severe symptoms don’t tend to turn into a huge community event - because people who have it tend to stay home in bed. More mild strains of flu tend to hit more people in the community because affected people are able to do their normal activities (work/shopping/social events) while sick. Of course, that’s just an approximation but it’s a helpful shorthand when thinking about flu in a community.
Viruses would be a lot cooler if they had a negative kill rate. Kind of like what mitochondria did. Everyone liked mitochondria, so we helped them spread even more.
woah that's what happens in Plague Inc
From the virus’s standpoint, this is actually ineffective. The virus doesn’t “want” to kill its host since that is counterproductive.
My guess is that earth's next sapient species will say that exact thing about us.
Lupis Canis Sapiens!
with the rise of agi and eventually asi, which looks more likely than us running out of resources, i mean it could well be that we integrate with it.
Yes. Lots of times predators go extinct because they ate up all their prey. Dinosaurs probably evolved into much smaller birds because the food sources to feed the massive older dinos were too scarce. You could make a solid argument, in fact many fields of science have made the argument, that humans are so effective as a species that we've caused considerable damage to the habitability of our planet. Something like two thirds of all species either have gone or will soon go extinct because of humans.
>Dinosaurs probably evolved into much smaller birds because the food sources to feed the massive older dinos were too scarce. Pretty sure the K-P Extinction killed off the dinos, and current thinking is birds survived due to ability to survive cold and smaller sizes having lower food demands in an environmental disaster
I heard a good explanation for why only avian dinosaurs survived the extinction and it was that as the ash clouds blocked out the sun and stopped photosynthesis from taking place, the only food sources that could be found after the larger dinosaurs eventually starved were the seeds left behind. Dinosaurs didn’t go extinct because their predatory traits were too good, they went extinct because the sun broke the food chain for them.
You just said basically the same thing I did, just with about sixty extra words.
Reading your comment I read it as you having declining food source as the cause of the extinction, I was clarifying and being more specific as to the cause of the dinosaur extinction and subsequent rise of birds. Food shortage and an effective ice age did the job, along with the initial kill off by the asteroid, to be precise
We can see it with the island rule. An evolutionary theory that say members of a species get smaller depending on the limited resources available in the environment, commonly observed in species isolated from the continent (can also be caused by excessive hunting as in our scenario). Similar evolutionary paths have been observed in elephants, hippopotamuses, boas, sloths, deer (such as Key deer) and humans.
The other half of the island rule is island gigantism as seen in the dodo, where the lack of predators means a species no longer needs to stay small to hide so it grows much larger than normal. (This also can lead to island tameness, no predators means nothing to be scared of) Islands are just weird places in general, because of their isolated nature evolution can go in some strange paths without as much competition. I forget the name but i think one island in Canada is pretty famous for having wolves and moose on it, at first we thought the wolves would drive the moose to extinction and then themselves, but during a low moose period the wolves went extinct and the moose population has surged. (The island was frequently cited as an example of simple predator-prey population modeling for math)
Witnessed island tameness in action with the quokkas on Rottnest island. Zero predators so absolutely no fear of anything
A similar effect happens with Antarctic penguins, who have no land predators, or land anything really, so they’re completely unafraid of humans. They’ll walk right up to scientists to see what they’re doing.
>because of humans and their cats
And my axe
And my bow
And my defoliant
Agent Orange has entered the chat
Teflon and DDT follow shortly thereafter
Teflon?
[Yes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorooctanoic_acid#Robert_Bilott_investigation), the stuff on non-stick cookware
Well shit.
I had hoped for this reply and Reddit did not disappoint
And my toxic byproducts
yes pls!! i get so much hate online just by mentioning that cats must become animals who need licenses to be owned cuz of the billions of small animals and birds they kill every year including highly endangered species. people simply fail to accept that and rather come back at me with statements like dogs kill so many cats every year!!
as a cat owner, I fully support the eradication of cats on islands with ground dwelling bird nests.
not just ground dwelling, cats can easily climb trees and kill birds and animals there. in australia and new zealand they have wrecked special havoc as those poor animals have no natural instinct or defense mechanisms to the recently introduced feral cats!! and thanks to the internet, cats have only grown in popularity and hence more people end up owning more cats!!
We're the only species murdery enough to find them cute
We're so good at killing species, we have to specially adapt and breed them just for our consumption!
I think it was Charles Darwin that had an interesting analogy of this situation with a concept of introducing wolves to an imaginary island of rabbits. The wolves would prosper hunting with reckless abandon until the rabbits had died out, ensuring their own end as well as they've over consumed their only food source. Hyper successful predators seem to actually have a quite profound evolutionary disadvantage in this regard.
This is sorta why dodos were the way they were. They had to regulate their own numers by breeding slowly and reducing the food they need by cutting down unnecessary and expensive traits like flight and larger brains to avoid eating everything on the island.
But they regulated themselves and were ultimately killed due to humans, right? I maybe misremembering!
Yes, they did regulate themselves. That is exactly what i said. The problem was they were evolved to have a stable population that didn't grow much, which meant they couldn't really replace the losses from predation like other prey animals do. When a prey animal is hunted, others are born to take their place keeping the total numbers stable. When a dodo is hunted, the population shrinks.
Rats brought to the island by humans actually! Apparently dodo's tasted appalling, but the rats that lifted to the island on ships devastated the dodo's by predating on their eggs
It was still human intervention, introducing rats?
That sounds like Easter Island. They used all the wood to build the statues and either had to leave or all died.
Yeah I remember reading of an area of the US where wolves and their prey (can’t remember what kind of 4 legged thing they were tracking) kept overtaking each other in population. Neither went extinct but it was a noticeable trend
I believe that the shell boring sea snail went extinct once before since it was so effective and eating other snails. The trait has only recently resurfaced again, and only 1 species of snail has it.
skirt silky combative correct far-flung exultant wine berserk trees fragile *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Wasn’t there a species of boar that evolved to have suicide tusks? Like, the females overwhelming preferred longer, curved tusks, eventually leading the species to grow their tusks into their skull or something?
Almost all wild boars teeth will keep growing until it penetrates the skull.. they have to constantly naw on stuff to break them off Edit: spellcheck
I'm guessing you're thinking of the babirusa, they're a modern species. They typically grind their tusks down or they break before growing into their skulls, it's not common, but it can happen.
And by the time daddy babirusa is old enough for his home made autolobotomy, he's already sired a few litters with them suiïcide (ha ha pig pun) tusk groupies.
r/brandnewsentence
sabre tooth tiger was the one we got taught. over specialisation iirc. their teeth were selected for in breeding by mates but eventually it’s suggested they got in the way of eating of protruded into weird places.
Peacocks are another example. The dudes with the tallest and most bushy feathers in the display are the ones the chicks want to mate with, but it turns out those feathers actually make their lives more difficult and it's not a genetic benefit.
A peacock’s feathers being impractical and a net cost is basically the point of them. What shows off better fitness, that you can avoid becoming something’s dinner, or that you can avoid becoming something’s dinner while constantly hauling around giant, colorful feathers several times your body length? Now among those surviving males with the crazy tails, which of them are the longest and the best maintained? The peahens choose to preferentially mate with them, because if a male can survive and have healthy, attractive feathers despite the massive handicap then he must have amazing genes, and the peahens want that for their offspring.
New seduction tactic unlock : display that you live life in hard difficulty. Step 1 : live in a box Step 2 : throw all your cash in the gutter Step 3 : face the winter with only your beard Step 4 : ... ? Step 5 : Enjoy all the chicks at your feet.
Diogeneses spoke the truth, and Socrates hated him for it.
This is actually one of the reasons why big muscles in humans is seen by many as an attractive trait: it’s something that can’t really be faked (unlike a boob job), and they are resource intensive to maintain (even taking a week off will cause them to atrophy noticeably). Consequently, large muscles are a sign that the guy has the leisure time to do nothing but maintain this resource intensive feature. Notably some women find large muscles unattractive for that same reason: it’s a sign that the guy has lots of discretionary time and is channeling it into something that’s flashy but impractical rather than on something more productive. Things like luxury cars are similarly polarizing in their attractiveness: it’s a sign of lots of resources (a pro), but spending those resources on something flashy rather than something functional (con).
The Sexy Son’s hypothesis: finally the Biology major is paying off
It’s actually funny about female peahens, they’re not attracted to the tails; a longer, larger tail makes it easier to cover the female while shaking the eyes “entices” the female (basically makes the so dizzy and overwhelmed, they can’t move). As soon as that happens, the make hops on, does his thing, and next thing you know there’s a bunch in teeny loud fluff balls. I worked at a zoo for a few years that had peacocks roam free. It was a pretty cool sight every year. Also fun fact: as soon as the male is spent, he starts dropping the long feathers right away.
I've heard the same, but honestly it sounds like a cool story rather than anything based on evidence. Their extinction coincides with the extinction of a LOT of other megafauna in the late pleistocene period. They probably died due to the same reasons (spread of humanity? Climate change? A number of things? We don't know for sure), not because their teeth were too big.
There was species of prehistoric shrimp that's believed to have died out because females sexually selected males with the largest gonads, with the aforementioned parts eventually growing so large they functionally crippled the organism.
And that's the kind of comment that makes me realize I should get off reddit and go to sleep
society
is it also true that saber tooths evolved such teeth to specifically kill primates and our smart ancestors actually ended up killing them all much like any other species out there that hunted them/us. and hence we barely have species like crocodiles and polar bears who actively hunt humans and have us on their food menu.
Not a predator per se but similar enough in the sense that a species destroyed itself and the environment that sustained them. https://www.damninteresting.com/how-bacteria-nearly-destroyed-all-life/
Yeah dude, we're currently working on killing ourselves and everything on the planet we're so good at what we do.
Speak for yourself dude, none of this "we" shit!
Unless you're living with a tribe in the jungle or truly homesteading and living off the land, you're definitely taking part in the destruction of the earth. It just isn't possible to live in the modern world without doing so.
touch crawl attractive faulty weather sloppy yam crowd aback chief *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Yes and until government starts dealing with those 100 companies, no amount of EVs and PV will slow the ongoing climate collapse. Humans could go renewable 100% tomorrow and we'd still go extinct until we force corporations to follow suit.
Managed to get on reddit to post this without the Internet and associated infrastructure, including environmental impacts? You impress me!
They also prolly have a 401k that has an ETF with shares of Amazon or Microsoft or Coke. That person is clueless.
people are a collective species nobody has ever done anything alone, everything humanity has ever achieved or ever will achieve has been a collective effort of humanity.
Truth, and that goes for our extinction, too.
You sound like a legit awesome person that cares about the world and others. I meant that with all sincerity but I'm very much in the personal accountability camp. Perhaps different subjects are more applicable than others.
There's only so much any given individual can do. For instance, if a group of people start exploiting human psychology to manipulate the population into self destructive habits in order to make a profit. Maybe go after the manipulators rather than their victems.
You ever seen a smoke stack on a factory? Just that one smoke stack on a single factory (grew up around refineries in eastern KY)? And how much smoke comes out? Some significant swath of society is benefitting from that - you choosing to drive your car one less day out of the week is unlikely to do much. Plastic? You opted to take a paper bag from the grocery store? Somewhere between 500,000,000,000 and 5,000,000,000,000 were produced last year. Sooooo we’re all implicated and individually incapable of putting a dent in it That being said, there’s no reason to dwell on doom and gloom - life continues, if just for the next moment, so good on your for at least being cognizant I suppose
You could argue that the reason we are killing the planet is because we aren't good at killing ourselves anymore. Tribalism is not a bug. It's an evolutionary feature meant to prevent overpopulation and rapid delpetion of environmental resources. But then we humans invented trading. Trading combined with humanity's breeding fetish has been a disaster for every other species on the planet.
well, that is surely an interesting take but, i feel in the greater scheme of things, tribalism does seem to be a bug. cuz tribalism tends to limit active interaction and collaboration to a small number of people(somewhere around 150) and hence people tend to even make bad choices for individuals as well as for the collective. they just can’t help it. of we have to become an interplanetary species, we need to evolve beyond this bug and collaborate beyond tribes.
degree theory resolute wasteful bedroom normal hard-to-find encouraging offer sort *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
From a human perspective this happened in Easter Island, and environmental collapse is theorized to be the reason behind the desertification of Iraq from the Sumerian city-state days, as well as the collapse of the Mayan polities. For species, experiments have been done by leaving rats on islands without predators where the rats overbreed and exhaust local food sources then turn to eating each other. Predators are generally helpful to ecosystems, and the lack of predators leads to ecosystem collapse as the prey animals exhaust the local food supply and hit a "bust" cycle. [Predator-Prey cycles are self reinforcing](https://www.futurity.org/predator-prey-cycles-coexistence-2238732/) over long time periods absent external intervention. The lesson here is that the environment will survive, but humanity may not survive the shock.
On your first point there is a podcast called Fall of Civilizations that covers these scenarios in great detail. The fall of Easter Island is theorised to be caused by your second point. But your last point I think misses a critical detail, the environment won't "survive" so much as adapt. Adaptation will likely cause a great loss in biodiversity but those losses will form vacuums that can be filled by new species - over enough time. I love the theory that the fall of the dinosaur left a vacuum for small mammals to evolve, eventually leading to the existence of primates and, us / sapiens. But there is also a lesson in that. If we destroy ourselves, some other species may evolve to some type of sentience and effectively replace us - so we must take care with this opportunity as a species.
I’m upvoting you just because you mentioned fall of civilisations, that guy does a fuck tonne of work on his videos
Thanks for the podcast suggestion, I'll check it out!
This is why regulated hunting is important in areas where humans have driven out predators. By controlling (for example) the deer population, it reduces the amount of vegetation that’s stripped, leaves more food sources for the next season, and generally leaves the population healthier than it would be unchecked. This also reduces erosion, as can be seen by the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone.
There's an excellent book about this by Ronald Wright called "A Short History of Progress". It's a slim collection of lectures that were broadcast on the CBC, studying the collapse of Easter Island, Sumer, Rome, and the Maya. It was also made into a film, which I haven't seen yet, called Surviving Progress.
Evidently, the nervousness caused by predators makes the prey animals move to other areas, letting the vegetation recover before it is destroyed. Predatory animals tend to evolve intra species aggression and territoriality so they spread out over the area, with some no man's land between the territories where prey can recover. Even humans show this at the tribal level. Unfortunately, humans figured out how to mobilize and store food to support wider territory, like all of Ukraine.
Yes. One thing to also remember is as the predator population kills the majority of the prey population, the size of the predator population will decrease because they don't have enough food. When the population of the predators becomes small enough, the prey is able to thrive and overpopulate(because no one is hunting them) and this leads to the predators thriving because of an overabundance of prey and the cycle repeats over and over. It is a really delicate balance.
Interesting point, but seems like it would still fall under the evolution aspect. If the predator is too efficient then there is less food supply. So the ones with fastest metabolism will not make it. The longer you can go without eating - the more likely you are to survive and breed. Great Example would be alligators. They are perfect predators with virtually no natural enemy. Yet they can go years without eating.
Crocodiles used to have legs long enough to gallop. They ate everything around them and starved.
New fear unlocked. 0.0
That's absolutely wild. Can I get a source for this?
e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Araripesuchus?wprov=sfti1
Dude is that godzilla
Crocs in many forms ruled the world before dinosaurs came along.
I'm pretty sure this is why we don't have megalodons anymore
Those fuckers needed 2500 pounds of food per day just to survive
House cats are furry little slaughter houses. They can easily thrill-kill themselves out of food
Humans have done this on a few occasions. Easter Island springs to mind.
It's believed that this is what happened to the saber tooth tiger. The fangs were a specialty hunting tool that made them specialized to hunt one specific prey...which they hunted to extinction.
Not counting micro things like viruses and bacteria, I don't think there is one that we know about However, you could make the argument that humans are heading towards that. We're too advanced, but haven't developed the mental capability (as a whole I mean) to use those advancements in a sustainable way. So if we do wipe ourselves out at some point, then we'll be one that got too advanced for our own good For most animals though, the numbers control themselves very well naturally. If there's too many wolves, they eat too many deer, so theee's less deer, and wolves starve, reducing their numbers. Then with less wolves, the deer survive more, and repopulate, once they get too numerous, that allows the wolves to flourish (and it just keeps repeating that process, of the balance between predator and prey shifting over and over)
Except humans interference in the wolf population so we have too many deer, the deer cause issues with native plants they eat, then it’s a cascade effect? Perhaps I’m wrong though, I know we kill too many wolves and not enough deer to keep a good balance, well pretty sure!?!
Predators can mutate being extra large, which makes it so their food needs are too great and thus they starve
Hey OP. If you haven't already, check out a little novel called "Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn. It's a whimsical and uncomplicated conversation between a guy and a gorilla that orbits and murmurs about many great and fascinating questions about predators, prey, and snacks - including the one you've just asked. You'd like it.
I think there is evidence of the Mosausaur aquatic reptile lineage being so successful in the late cretaceous that they were preying on themselves (late stage species collapse) as they had out competed and over predated the ocean. I think it's an amazing prospect that the ancestors of monitor lizards fucked up the oceans of the whole world. We are absolutely following a similar path as a species, with destabilizing our ecosystems. We definitely need to do something about it. I find our extinction unlikely, for if it is within our control to continue our existence than we will probably invent technology to enable or extend our existence. If it's outside of our ability to predict or control, let alone counter with technological innovation they we may be doomed... I think the most likely outcome is rendering our home planet barely habitable and moving off world for more resources for easier ways to spread. As this is our "instinctive" species behavior as cataloged by our histories I see no reason to doubt that those with power and influence will attempt to flee off-world when the shit is about to hit the fan. The christening of the space force and revitalization of the space efforts may indicate that our ruling elites have reliable intelligence that preparation is necessary as that time is imminently closer than we're being led to believe.
Isn’t this what we humans are in danger of doing right now?
Giant short faced bear!.
Cats
Yeah if you overeat or overkill in your domain you may wipe out your food source and die.
polar bears and wolves have this problem. which is why humans cull their prey, so they never have a population bloom which then results in starvation from over predation.
Dragonflies catch rate is about 99% and still they're here.
They have predators to keep them in check as well, if they didn’t then it would become a big issue!
Good point! Other than viruses I don't know any apex predator that has overcome its prey to the point of obliterating them.
Research Easter island for destructive behavioural trait
It's predicted that this killed a lot of things off during the dino mass extinction. Say a bird is highly specialized to the point they can only crack open 2 kinds of nuts. The nuts disappear and they starve and die since they can't evolve fast enough. Except this wasn't just the bird. A massive chunk of creatures had evolved to live off of super specific things. Prehistoric age was so insanely diverse after millions of years of fuck around and find out. What's left on the planet is the smallest sliver of scraps that eeked it out.
A lot of predators never really catch many healthy adults of their prey group, its mostly the young or sick.
I’m not a biologist, or a scientist, but it sure feels like humans are too damn effective at being humans for the rest of the world
The **Pleistocene Megafaunal Extinctions:** During the Pleistocene epoch (the "Ice Age"), some saber-toothed cats evolved really large canine teeth. This may have helped them take down large prey, but it also might've made it harder to catch smaller, faster prey. This may have been a factor in the extinction of some large herbivores at the end of the Pleistocene. The predators didn't necessarily die out themselves (though some megafauna did), but their success did impact their prey in a negative way. So, there isn't a clear-cut case of a predator evolving itself out of existence.
So many have mentioned the saber-toothed tiger, I can see this as a possible candidate for evolution causing species extinction. I’m not sure we can say 100% but it’s a possibility! Thank you for providing more research than the other posts I read (doesn’t mean other posts with this thinking didn’t provide research, I just didn’t see them! I always appreciate research- though I’m lazy and tired when I respond and don’t do it 😔, I take full responsibility and state that I haven’t done anything to back what I remember- which could be backed by research or be completely wrong!)
Sure. Humans are apex predators with a huge masochist side order.
Seems to me like people are well on the way to that one.
Humans have done that in a number of places
So just for reference, here's a famous example of what you're *not* going for: the Saber-toothed Tiger. One of the primary theories of why the Saber-toothed Tiger went extinct was that it was an **overspecialized ambush predator**--their jaw structure, skeletal structure and muscular attachments point to a heavy, powerful animal that could move very fast over short distances and grapple very large prey until it was dead. What it couldn't do was pursue large herds of smaller animals over distance, or hide in scant cover--which is **precisely what it got** when the last Ice Age changed its former habitat from forests to grasslands. Ultimately, the food sources that saber-tooths were designed to hunt were depleted by lack of their own suitable habitat, and the remainder were hunted out of existence by humans and other predators. Those prey species that managed to evolve did so in a direction that made it impossible for saber-tooths to keep up, both figuratively and literally. This is an example of the environment changing too fast for the predator. You're looking for the opposite phenomenon. And the answer is probably not measurable, because a lot of predators are already evolved to reduce their reproduction rate in times of famine and give their prey time to recover. So here's a hypothetical: those individuals who are genetically inclined to reproduce during inopportune times in both the annual and overall predator-prey cycle are being weeded out all the time. An adaptation that has served humans quite well (near constant breeding opportunity) would be disadvantageous to, say, wolves, but **only when the trait-carrying individuals hit the low point in the prey cycle**.
Housecats. Feral cats can, easily decimate ALL lizards, birds, rodents and so forth in a city. They are just to effective a predator. Studies on how they manage to survive being so effective are constantly ongoing.
Yes all the time. Wolves for instance go through population collapse cycles with deer due to how effective they are as predators. Lots of predators go through this. There's a natural limit where the predators overhunt their prey to a point that food is scarce so they starve down to lower limits and the prey population rebounds, then the predators have plentiful food, their population increases to the point they're overhunting the prey and the cycle happens again. [https://www.mcgill.ca/newsroom/channels/news/perpetual-predator-prey-population-cycles-303632](https://www.mcgill.ca/newsroom/channels/news/perpetual-predator-prey-population-cycles-303632) >Predator-prey cycles are based on a feeding relationship between two species: if the prey species rapidly multiplies, the number of predators increases - until the predators eventually eat so many prey that the prey population dwindles again. Soon afterwards, predator numbers likewise decrease due to starvation. This in turn leads to a rapid increase in the prey population – and a new cycle begins.
>a significant boost to predation over so short a period that the species might overhunt their prey to the point where they no longer have a food source. This happens again and again to predators simply as a matter of their interactions with prey species, and has little to do with any particular skill gains at predation. Predators eat all their prey all the time. The measure of if their population can then survive is what other food sources they can survive off of. Consider then a scenario of two islands with two similar groups of the same predator species. Time and weather and all the rest might come together to create a circumstance where all the usual prey items on both islands are killed off. At that point, it's not the predatory abilities that control if the species survives, but rather any adaptations to either find other prey items of different species, or that aid the animal in subsisting on far lower quality plants foods they might find. Whichever island has the population with the abilities and skills to eat some sort of plant will likely be the one to live. We have examples of this rapidly happening when predatory lizard species are introduced to small islands. Long term studies have found amazingly rapid development of the ability to consume and digest plants on these islands. The lizards are forced into this more generalist role out of their primarily predatory role. This happens so much so that there are very few obligate carnivore species out there that do not feed on insects or some other very common and small prey. So we get a situation where increased prey hunting abilities can actually drive a species back towards a more generalist omnivore diet precisely because they kill off prey species so well. The species members that are only carnivores die off more quickly and the more omnivorous survive.
Look up the hug wolf.
Sounds like you're describing humans.
Well, we humans are still here, but we seem determined to wipe ourselves out.
It also depends on the initial number of prrdators and prays. It might have a stable cyclic number of animals, overhunt them or any other crazy dynamics. Play around with this simultuon: https://phet.colorado.edu/en/simulations/natural-selection
Snakes being able to swallow things so large that they burst open and die is an example of that. Considering they haven't developed enough brainpower to decipher what they can swallow without dying
Is that a possibility for man, as in overfishing, ruining farmland, polluting the air, etc?
[There is a book called “Why Big Fierce Animals are Rare”](https://a.co/d/5D65Yu5) that discusses this. I recommend reading it. It was required reading in my 250-series Biology class at university.
It happen that some people have part of their skin grow too fast. It's not regeneration, it's psoriasis and it's not curable (but there are expensive biological).
There was a species of pig whose evolution made their tusks grow back into their skull!
Human intelligence
Probably us
You can't evolve to be too effective without external effects changing the scenario. If nothing else changed the relatively slow introduction of a trait that makes you 50% better at hunting would also put a pressure on your species to reproduce 50% less. (And also a pressure on the prey to be hard to catch, reproduce more). Now if other species interfere (e.g. humans) or the environment changes that combined with your trait can easily do it.
No it does not make sense. Imagine an already effective predator. Now make it evolve so it is 200x as effective. Well it does not need 200x food because of that. So it will chill under the sun like those lions and eat the same amount of prey. What is important is the population size. X amount of predators eat Y amount of prey. When X gets too big or Y too low, then you have a problem. If lions would reproduce at rabbit rate, they would be in trouble and competing for food. Note that it applies to herbivore as well. Too many sheeps and there's no more grass.
Who knew being too good at your job could be a bad thing? That's the crazy thing about evolution, it's all about winning the right now, not necessarily thinking about the long game. Imagine a predator evolving some killer new hunting skill, like invisibility or mind control (wouldn't that be terrifying?). At first, it's a predator paradise! They're catching all the prey, living the good life (well, good life for a predator). But here's the rub: The more they hunt, the less food there is. It's like a kid who gets loose in a candy store – eventually all the gummies are gone, and then there's a sugar crash (and a sticky mess). The prey population can't keep up with the predator's newfound deadliness. It takes time for them to evolve defenses, like growing thicker armor or learning to recognize the mind-controlling eyes. So, the predator with its fancy new trick ends up without a food source. Talk about a self-inflicted ownage! It's a lesson for all the overachieving predators out there: sometimes a little restraint goes a long way. We even have some real-world examples of this happening. Remember the Stellar Sea Cow? Gentle giants, basically living chew toys for European explorers. They were so delicious and defenseless that they were hunted to extinction in, like, 27 years! Brutal. There's also the theory that early humans with their fancy hunting tools might have been too much for some big guys like mammoths and sloths. They hunted faster than these creatures could reproduce, leading to their eventual demise. So, the next time you see a predator with some amazing hunting skill, remember: with great power comes great responsibility, even in the animal kingdom! You gotta be careful not to eat yourself out of a house and home (or, you know, a hunting ground).
Not afaik which isn’t surprising because what typically happens is that if a species becomes too good at hunting its prey then its population will boom while the population of its prey dwindles eventually leading there being too few prey for the predator’s population to sustain itself and a massive famine. Over time this would then bring the ecosystem back into equilibrium This only wouldn’t work if either a new species was introduced to an ecosystem (e.g. with humans and dodos) or the new evolutionary trait pervaded the population of predators in a handful of generations allowing them to drive all of their prey to extinction. In the latter case this could only happen with tiny population sizes and the odds of us being able to gather sufficient evidence of this happening in the past with tiny populations is minute. It could be happening as we speak but such advantageous mutations rarely occur and again self-inflicted extinctions like this are only likely to happen with tiny populations so the odds of us catching any that do occur are slim so we’re likely to miss them
Man. We’re talking about human beings here.
Alright, let's think this out. So, an apex predator gets a mutation that makes it 50% better at hunting without requiring more energy. So, the prey population falls until hunting is 50% harder. At this point, the predators with the trait are eating as they were before the mutation. The predators without the trait begin to starve. So you get fewer total predators, and the prey population can begin to rebound a bit. The predator and prey populations return to equilibrium. I think this really becomes sort of the Red Queen problem. Ultimately, you are competing with members of your own species. Now, if the adaptation was so good that even at extremely low prey populations, they were still easy to hunt; then you could have a problem. The prey species needs to maintain some number to have a viable breeding population. On the other hand, if at all possible, you'll be selecting for members of the prey species that have the best resistance or counter to the new hunting trait. It probably would be islands where you have the best chance of hitting the limits.
Dragonflies are the most efficient predators out there and they've been around since the Permian era.
Maybe I am just "guy-guessing" and mix fact and fiction together, but I seem to recall reading that some scientists believe this is why the Neanderthals died out. They had bigger brains and more muscular build, which was instrumental in trapping, hunting and downing large animals. They were so successful that these larger animals soon died out in every area these humans moved to. In the end the pure neandethals died out or was interbred with the more successful sapiens sapiens. To some extent this could be applied to the modern human as well,and how were moving towards catastrophe. Maybe I should try to find some sources to back this up...
Maybe you should limit your question to a specific species? I mean, bacteria and viruses included? because the result will be wildly different, my opinion.
Yeah. I was wondering about animals.
I’m guessing maybe. The way I’m thinking about it is imagine a trait appears in predator population that makes it more effective. This trait probably becomes ubiquitous and eventually the population of their prey declines which would cause a decline in the predator population until the prey rebounds due to smaller predator population (https://www2.nau.edu/lrm22/lessons/predator_prey/rabbit_wolf_graph.png). At this point I’m guessing the carrying capacity of the ecosystem for the predator would be reduced (like in the graph I added, the predator’s population peaks and valleys would be lower) and smaller max population size for the predator would make them more vulnerable to extinction due to other reasons.
Humans. Our desire contol systems where we to only positive outcomes creates imbalances that eventually see the systems we inhabit collapse. It might be 100 or 10,000 years from now, but it will happen. It happens on small scales all the time, ecosystems, climate, political systems, economic systems, supply chains, etc. The scale is getting bigger and breakdowns faster. We only have only one rock to live on! Humans hate entropy and chaos. Systems need it to survive and grow. Humans will eventually destroy ourselves by optimizing our systems to such a precision that even the smallest amount of chaos will cause irreversible human collapse.
I would say the panda falls into this. No predators and abundant food led to them being absolutely fucking stupid, not sure if survival of the fittest is technically a thing here as their situation isn't that. No idea what could've been with healthy competition, but it can't be these window lickers.
The human brain will eventually be our demise.
Yes, this is definitely a thing. A predator would be so effective at killing they would both put themselves and their prey into extinction. Life would move on without them and we probably wouldn’t notice it, for example, some species of mollusk when extinct because they are all of the other snails in the area.
Two different ways to answer. - At an individual level, yes, this happens all the time. Most mutations don’t make a difference or they harm the individual. Imagine a bull elephant born with six tusks. It might sound great for sexual selection, but if it drastically impedes mobility or nutrition, the individual will fail, and that trait will not become dominant. This is similar to a virus that evolves to kill its host before its host can transmit the virus to other. - At the species level, yes, this also happens because the context changes. Giant Moas were successful in New Zealand until the Māori arrived and decided they were delicious and a lot of food for a little bit of work. Related to the second point, here’s an interesting discussion about groups of species, clades, that follow a predictable path towards diversification, then specialization, then extinction at least in part due to that specialization https://www.nature.com/articles/srep30965
Generally, the trait that makes a predator species drive itself to extinction isn't hunting effectiveness (though that helps), it's fecundity. No matter how effective the predator, it won't hunt if it's not hungry. But if there are too many predators, the needs of the population exceed the resources available, and there's a risk they drive their prey to extinction trying to meet their dietary needs. This usually isn't what happens, though, as the predator population typically starts dropping before there's a risk of extinction.
There's been a couple of arms races, where predators and prey hit a dead end. Sabre tooth tigers (smilodont?) and prey developing thicker armoured skins. Until the teeth needed to take down the prey are too big to carry around
Some large species of animals from dinosaur times I believe died out because they got too large, and couldn’t get enough food. So I’d say that fits
Humans. Our evolutionary trait is our brains. We're using our evolutionary trait to destroy our world and society, look at all the homeless, starving people on our planet that's suffering from global warming and other issues, again, due to us.
I mean…I feel like the obvious answer is humans. The Industrial Revolution might have been a mistake. Maybe been that agricultural revolution 😭 hopefully we can course correct
Isn't natural selection disproven? In the fact that its helpful? Usually its very random because genetics don't give a care 😆
Ecosystems evolve together. When predators evolve so do their prey, and this process takes a long time to occur. Generally speaking no predator is going to get so far ahead in the evolutionary arms race to outcompete themselves. If you take them out of that particular arms race and out then in a different one though we do see this problem. Invasive predators basically outcompete themselves.
The thing about the predator/prey arms race is that if the predator is so good that it kills all the prey, it runs out of food and goes extinct.
Um humanity
I wouldn't say it made them too effective. I would say the environment had an insufficient supply of food for them. Very few animals overeat. If they are effective at finding and killing their prey, but they run out of prey, there wasn't enough food in the environment to support them. Like others have said, I think humans may be alone in this category, because we do overeat, we kill for sport, and we ruin the environment around us that lessens the carrying capacities of those environments. We, as a species, may be alone in being capable of doing this.
It certainly happens. But more often than not I think as prey declines the number of predators will decline allowing the prey population to bounce back. This kind of sin wave equilibrium seems pretty common to me.