Top predators reshape whole landscapes, and scientists still argue whether humans count
When gray wolves returned to Yellowstone in 1995, elk grew scarcer and warier, and streamside willows, aspens and cottonwoods sprang back. That is the reach of an apex predator. Whether people belong in the same category depends on who does the maths, and on whether you count fish or farms.
An apex predator sits at the top of its food chain with few or no natural enemies. On land chains tend to be short: wolves eat large herbivores, which eat plants. The role is ancient, reaching back at least to the Cambrian, around 500 million years ago, when Anomalocaris ruled the seas. Later holders included Allosaurus and Tyrannosaurus, a Permian shark found with two amphibians in its gut, one of which had itself swallowed a fish, and sabre-toothed cats like Smilodon.
Their influence cascades. By thinning prey and suppressing smaller hunters, they help regulate disease and preserve biodiversity. Arctic foxes introduced to subarctic islands ate so many seabirds that grassland turned to tundra, and removing non-native smallmouth bass from one lake let native lake trout broaden their diet and climb a trophic level. Many top predators were hunted close to extinction, and now climate change threatens others, such as polar bears losing the sea ice they hunt from.
People have long partnered with predators. Humans hunted alongside wolves and then dogs for 40,000 years, perhaps gaining an edge over Neanderthals; falconers fly eagles and falcons, and tethered cormorants catch fish. Newer relationships include ecotourism, where feeding tiger sharks to draw visitors is controversial, and rewilding, from the Iberian lynx to 2015 proposals to return lynx to parts of England and Scotland, where wolves, bears and lynx were long ago wiped out.
As for our own rank, Sylvain Bonhommeau's team in 2013 averaged the trophic levels of everything humans eat and got 2.21, closer to a pig than a wolf, ranging from 2.04 in largely plant-eating Burundi to 2.57 in Iceland. Peter Roopnarine objected in 2014 that this reflected farming; placed in marine food webs, humans rank much higher. In 2026 Miki Ben-Dor and colleagues, comparing traits such as stomach acidity and tool use, concluded that humans evolved as apex predators and broadened their diets only after most megafauna disappeared.
Source: Apex predator
