Fear factor

When you were a child, you probably learned about the food chain - the route that food takes in nature. Animals feed on other animals, but in turn they become victims themselves and are also devoured by animals, thus contributing their part to the great circle of life.

Today it is looked at in a slightly different way: in fact it is not a chain, but a complicated network called the food web, in which predator-prey relationships are more complex. The web is arranged as a pyramid, at the top of which until recently were the super predators such as the lion, shark and eagle, who have no natural predator and therefore only play the role of the predator and not the role of the prey. But then we came and changed the balance: man became a predator that has no competitors, and one that also hunts and kills the super-predators. The new status of man in the food web even earned him a new name - "Super-predator", one that is at the top of the pyramid, above all other predators.

Now it seems that the new status of man has penetrated deeply into the behavior of the animals. as per New research According to researchers from Western University in Canada, animals seem to have developed a special fear of humans: in a study, the animals demonstrated a different and increased behavior of caution when they suspected that a human, and not another predator, was in their environment.

What do the badgers do at night?

The researchers conducted the study on badgers in Whitham Forest in England. The common badger, a carnivore from the weasel family, belongs to a group of omnivorous carnivores that feed on plants and invertebrates. Animals such as the badger, whose hunting is a significant part of their diet, have good reason to fear man: he kills them at a rate 4.3 times higher than the other natural predators that threaten them.

Although the badger is not defined as an animal in danger of extinction, badger hunting is still illegal today in England. Despite this, it is estimated that approximately 10,000 badgers are hunted in the country each year as part of sport hunting. They are also hunted by farmers (against the law), because they dig and eat their crops and sometimes prey on poultry and lambs. In a survey conducted by the researchers among the farmers living on the edge of Withham Forest, one in eight farmers confessed to killing a badger during the past year.

Another human threat to the badgers comes indirectly, through their best friend: the Withham Forest area is full of dogs - guard dogs and sheepdogs are common on the farms surrounding the forest, and the nearby villages are full of pet dogs. Although the entry of the dogs into the forest is prohibited, the badgers encounter them and are hunted by them when they go out to gather food at the edge of the forest. The dogs were also formerly used as partners in sporting badger hunting. Other natural predators that could threaten the badgers, such as wolves and bears, disappeared from the area completely hundreds of years ago.

On dogs, bears and humans

During the study, the researchers placed hidden video cameras in the forest area, and examined the behavior of the badgers when they were played recordings of the sounds of different animals: dogs, sheep, wolves, bears and humans. The sheep were chosen as a control factor for the experiment - an animal that should not threaten the badgers and influence their behavior. The dogs were also a factor of criticism, and according to the hypothesis they were supposed to provoke a reaction of fear similar to a human.

Indeed, although the badgers did express fear when they heard the voices of the dogs, and to the surprise of the researchers, the voices of the bears as well - even though these have not been around in Britain for many years, no animal provoked a reaction like the human voice. In response to the voices of people conversing or reading passages from a book, the badgers were very hesitant to go out to look for food, and if they did go out - they did so only for a short time, demonstrating increased vigilance and caution. The badgers demonstrated this behavior in response to human voices in much more significant percentages than to the voices of dogs and bears, and unlike hearing the voices of the other animals - most of them left the den only after the human voices stopped completely. Surprisingly, the badgers did not react at all with fear to the voices of the wolves, despite the great similarity between their voices and the voices of the dogs.

According to the researchers, the results of the study reinforce the assumption that man has acquired a special status - that of a super-predator. "Studies we conducted in the past showed that the very fear that large predators evoke may shape ecosystems," explains Dr. Liana Zant, one of the researchers. "The new results indicate that it is likely that the fear of man, being deeper, has an even greater impact on the environment, that is - it is possible that man is disrupting processes in the ecosystem even more than we could assume in the past."

scares the foxes

Despite the results of the experiment, the attempt to categorize man in the ecosystem as a super-predator is problematic, and it is possible that the picture is much more complex. "In the world and in Israel, for example, we can point to many cases where the animals actually got used to the presence of humans in places where there is no hunting," says Prof. Uri Shains, a lecturer and researcher in the Department of Biology and the Environment at the University of Haifa - Oranim. "The picture is even more complex, because man causes substantial changes in the habitats of the animals, so his influence is not only in the layer of hunting. In the study we conducted in the Southern Arava, for example, we tested the effect of human presence on the behavior of gerbils. We found that gerbils show greater fear while foraging in Israel compared to Jordan, likely due to an increased presence of foxes on the Israeli side of the border, which followed humans. However, when jackals also arrived in the area, the activity of the foxes decreased. There is a kind of monotony of fear combined with hunting and preying.

"In order to prove that man is a super-predator, the experiment had to be done on a population where the tested species is exposed to both super-predators and humans. To show whether the fear effect of humans on other animals is higher than the fear effect of a top predator like a wolf, for example, we will have to do a specific experiment in a place where there are both wolves and people,'' adds Shanes. "Israel could be a better place to conduct such an experiment than England, where there have been no wolves for many years. Although Israel is far from England and other European countries in the hunting culture, it still exists here and there is also illegal hunting.

"I have no doubt that the killing effect of humans in Israel is much higher than the effect of other predators, but we still don't have exact numbers to back it up," Shains concludes. "At the same time, there are areas in the country that have high hunting pressure, and other areas that have relatively low hunting pressure, and accordingly - the behavior of the animals in these areas is also different."