Humans are good at killing things. Humans arrived on the islands, and wiped out thousands of different species.
Humans first arrived on the Pacific Ocean islands about 3,500 years ago, settling in locations such as Fiji and the Marianas. About 700 years ago, they spread out fully to the more remote islands, such as Hawai’i and Rapa Nui. The flightless birds that made their homes on these islands didn’t stand a chance against hunting and habitat loss.
After performing calculations for a total of 41 Pacific Islands, a staggering two-thirds of nonpasserine landbird populations on the islands died off after the arrival of people. In other words, 983 species of birds became extinct–not including seabird and passerine bird extinctions.
“If we take into account all the other islands in the tropical Pacific, as well as seabirds and songbirds, the total extinction toll is likely to have been around 1,300 species,” said Tim Blackburn, one of the researchers, in an interview with RedOrbit.
The study shows how much of an impact people can have on species, and reveals that massive rate of extinction that can occur if precautions aren’t taken.
We are a killer species. Thousands of species have been died out because of us. There is no cruel and brutal animal like humans! We kill anything that moves! We killed off Neanderthals. We would have wiped out dinosaurs if they were around. Humans kill humans everyday, everywhere. We will continue killing until our own extinction. We are a killer species!
Tee-hee. This made me think of Futurama:
Turns out, it’s man!
Ou contraire, if the dinosaurs hadn’t been eliminated by the asteroid/comet impact, we wouldn’t be here. No large mammals emerged prior to 65.5 million years ago and hominids and their predecessors qualify as large mammals. No hominid armed only with a spear would have stood a chance against a Tyrannosaurus.
I’m fairly certain that humans would figure out a fairly effective way to kill a T-Rex, even limited to primitive weapons. I imagine that what works for elephants wouldn’t be too far off.
I’m sure that’s what what smilodons and diprotodons thought, too.
In any case, they didn’t have to. Humans are perfectly good at driving species to extinction without killing them directly: habitat destruction and reducing prey numbers are pretty effective too. Take Haast’s Eagle – removing moas, the key prey species, meant they went the way of the dodo.
Well, not the way of the dodo, since that species was wiped out by humans 🙂
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It’s what we are, and we do it best in packs! 😀 We are ravenous, hungry, and we only use two limbs for transport. We’re biological deathmachines. We kill without a seconds thought or hesitation. We are beasts, and worse, we work in packs. We make wolf packs whimper and run. Never look us in the eyes, or you might shit in your pants. Any animal can kill ant eat if it’s hungry enough, but it’s us humans, you, me, her, him, even the old lady down the street would kill a thing without eating it, with the right motivation.
Hey, if being human helps me survive, I’m all for it~! 😀 I shouldn’t laugh about such things but, hey if you can’t laugh you can only cry.
While I’m not going to argue your basic premise, I think it’s important to point out that illustrations like the very interesting one you use were certainly not drawn by anyone who looked like the little brown person with the spear. They were drawn by rich white dudes, generally elite members of the British Empire. So there’s something a little bit colonial going on in them, behind the scene they portray. Which I suppose is just another way of saying, we do it to each other, too.
“We killed off Neanderthals. We would have wiped out dinosaurs if they were around. Humans kill humans everyday, everywhere. We will continue killing until our own extinction. We are a killer species!”
Well, whether “we” killed of the Neanderthals (that were a “killer species” to, btw) is far from certain. We wouldn’t have wiped out dinosaurs because, well, they’re still around. Only we call ‘m birds. And yes, we are a “killer species”, a.k.a. predators. The fact that humans wiped out so many species on remote islands is only because we’re good at getting there. Wiping out species by a predator that happens to find itself in a new environment is not all that suprising or uncommon, it happened many times during Earth’s history, long before humans existed (and still happens as a result of despersal of invasive animals by humans).
So yes, humans kill off many species, but I’d make a distinction between killing for food, and killing as a byproduct of other activities.
I appreciate your opinion.
So Humans kills Approximately 475,000 other humans a year. But Mosquitoes kill nearly double that at 750,000 per year. I could not find statistics on how many other animals the Mosquito kills nor how many other mosquitoes the mosquitoes kill. But assuming it is also a large number, I would say that Mosquitoes are twice as good as killing as humans are especially because mosquitoes don’t even have machines or weapons like humans.