from Wikipedia
The Fastest Way to Change a Species: Start Eating It:
[Via ScienceNOW]
Human hunting alters organisms’ size and breeding schedule three times faster than natural forces.
The PNAS article is entitled Human predators outpace other agents of trait change in the wild. It includes these sentences in its abstract:
Accordingly, harvested organisms show some of the most abrupt trait changes ever observed in wild populations, providing a new appreciation for how fast phenotypes are capable of changing. These changes, which include average declines of almost 20% in size-related traits and shifts in life history traits of nearly 25%, are most rapid in commercially exploited systems and, thus, have profound conservation and economic implications.
I bet it could have profound implications. Their work indicates that harvested animals become smaller and breed earlier than previously. Just as we breed really remarkable looking pigeons with directed selection, we appear to be doing similarly with the species we eat.
Eventually we will alter these species in ways that make them less likely to be harvested. That is what happens with out of control prey-predator settings. Will we then change our harvesting patterns to go after smaller and younger forms?
.jpg){kind=link}