Citation

Vermeij GJ. Evolution 2012; 66(7): 2007-2014.

Affiliation

Department of Geology, University of California Davis, Davis, California 95616 E-mail: gjvermeij@ucdavis.edu.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2012, Society for the Study of Evolution, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/j.1558-5646.2012.01592.x

PMID

22759280

Abstract

In the history of life, species have adapted to their consumers by evolving a wide variety of defenses. By contrast, animal species harvested in the wild by humans have not adapted structurally. Nonhuman predators have high failure rates at one or more stages of an attack, indicating that victim species have spatial refuges or phenotypic defenses that permit further functional improvement. A new compilation confirms that species in the wild cannot achieve immunity from human predation with structural defenses. The only remaining options are to become undesirable or to live in or escape to places where harvesting by people is curtailed. Escalation between prey defenses and predators' weapons may be restricted under human dominance to interactions involving those low-level predators that have benefited from human overexploitation of top consumers.

Language: en