Man is a terrible predator. He actually looks quite harmless. Much more harmless than, for example, a lion, which is significantly larger and faster. Nevertheless, giraffes, zebras, warthogs, antelopes, hyenas, leopards and many others are more afraid of humans than of lions. Just hearing human voices puts almost all animals in fear of death.
This is the result of an unusual experiment by Canadian biologist Liana Zanette with wild animals in Kruger National Park. the largest protected area in South Africa. The scientist and her team played human voices and the growls of lions to 19 different animal species and compared their reactions. “We wanted to find out whether humans are scarier than the scariest non-human predator,” says Michael Clinchy, who was involved in the study, just published in the journal Science Current Biology has appeared.
For their experiment, the researchers installed a loudspeaker and a camera about ten meters from various waterholes. As soon as animals came to drink, both devices switched on automatically using a motion detector. “We put the camera in a bear-proof box,” says Zanette. There are no bears in South Africa, but the box also protects against hyenas and leopards, “which like to chew on it.”
The animals fled twice as often from harmless voices on the radio as from the growls of lions
Although the human voices were not aggressive – they were simply recordings of radio broadcasts in various local languages - they triggered a flight response on average twice as often as the lion growl in 18 of 19 animal species observed. “Fear of people is deep-rooted and pervasive,” says Clinchy.
The only exception were elephants: they too often ran away at the sound of human voices, but then usually stopped and returned to the watering hole. Elephants aren’t particularly afraid of lions either: “The lion noises made an elephant so angry one night that it attacked and destroyed the speaker and camera,” says Zanette.
But the whole thing is much more than a fun experiment. It means that Homo sapiens are probably even more harmful to wildlife than previously thought. In addition to the well-known reasons for the extinction of species such as hunting, the destruction of habitat and climate change, the mere presence of humans apparently also poses a danger.
The study shows that the mere sound of human voices causes almost all animals to avoid a place that is important to them. Biologists speak of a “landscape of fear”, a landscape of fear that arises when places and entire regions become practically inaccessible to animals because people are there.
The phenomenon is also known from other predators, for example moose avoid places where wolves live. Unlike wolves, however, humans are omnipresent on Earth, and the fear of them seems to be much greater than of any other predator – and above all across species. It can probably be just as deadly as being shot directly by a hunter. For example, if, like the animals in the study, you don’t dare to go to a waterhole to drink from it in the middle of the dry season, you could die of thirst in extreme cases.
So humans are not normal predators, but rather a kind of super predator that kills with their mere presence.