May 2024
Today I am considering predator-prey relationships. The biblical statement in 1 Peter 1:24-25 states: “all flesh is as grass”. If we interpret grass as meaning all green, photosynthetic organisms including plants, algae, and some bacteria, then all flesh is indeed made from green things, as all global energy is ultimately solar. Then flesh eating organisms (including insectivorous plants, fungi, and some bacteria) are feeding on animals that consume plants as food in a chain of consumption and so on.
I saw some footage recently of a leopard in India wandering into an abandoned temple and finding a terrified wild pig in one of the rooms, essentially trapped. The leopard looked at the now petrified pig, and then walked on. The leopard was not hungry. Most of us will have seen the wildlife documentaries on TV showing ‘carnivores’ hunting herbivores. These events are quite infrequent, and it takes a lot of patience to film one. However, even cats like to eat grass sometimes, and sheep love to eat snails, to the point where several snail species living on the sheep-grazed grass of the South Downs are described as “sheep snails”. One of them even has a hairy shell and is known as the hairy snail (Trochulus hispidus). Also, deer like to hunt and eat frogs. A single blue tit nestling will have eaten more than 1000 caterpillars and a quantity of spiders before it leaves the nest. It will be just one of about 7 siblings each eating about the same amount, as will the 2 parents (total c. 10,000 prey items).
We may cringe when we see a lion bringing down an elephant or buffalo in Africa, but their physiology commits them to eating meat when they are hungry, and there are probably many days/weeks between such kills. But we are also omnivores, eating both plants and animals, most of the latter are not hunted as such, but raised in a protected and engineered habitat and fed on the best vegetation to maximise their bodily health and killed, ready for us to eat. We also eat the wild animals from the water such as fish and molluscs. All these are hunted by other humans on our behalf. Our effort is usually just to visit a market of some kind and collect them already prepared for cooking where required and consumption. We are still predators, because we depend on another organism to survive, whether it is a plant or an animal or even a fungus like mushrooms, alone or in cheese, yeast in bread, wine and beer and bacteria in yoghurt.