Notes from the misguided.
Discussion
I wonder what would happen if you put some humans in a plastic container and then brought out a lion?
Something similarly horrifying, but much redder 🤢 I wonder what would happen if you put some humans in a sealed plastic container and added Ebola?
The OP is classic Social Darwinism, which is what you get when sociopaths set out to use vaguely misunderstood scientific philosophy to justify their own antisocial behaviour. The apotheosis of this is Agent Smith in The Matrix.
The particular misunderstood science here is the ecological concept of food webs. This person is still using the "food pyramid" version of this. Which ecologists abandoned a *long* time ago, because it ignores all our everyday predators of the single-celled and fungal varieties.
An apex predator is at least cohesive with its ecosystem. An apex predator does not have the capacity to wipe out entire species and ecosystems including themselves, to which this misguided thinking accelerates progressing on that path.
TBF, it mostly looks that way because apex predators that are still around to be studied are the ones who perturb their biome only a little.
"Survivorship bias". Rather hard to study the ones that ate out their biome and didn't make it.
Alien xenozoologists may never learn we existed :D
Hahaha obviously he's not in Australia.
There are PLANTS above me in the food-chain here...
That sounds funny and terrible at the same time. Can you elaborate?
Eucalypts.
Carnivory is a common plant adaption to low-nutrient soils, but here we have a whole continent of nutrient-poor soils. So one family of trees levelled up and evolved a new toolkit.
Pyrocarnivory.
All inhabited continents have wildfires in dry woodlands, and these wildfires put out about 1 kW / m2 of heat. Enough to burn the leaves off fire-adapted plants, and kill non-fire-adapted plants and leave their nutrients in the ashes. Many species are adapted to take advantage of fire to kill rival plants.
But its not enough to reliably kill animals of any size. They move too fast.
So Australian eucalypts, in hot and lightning-prone weather, start emitting clouds of droplets of a natural napalm-analog, eucalyptol. When this eventually ignites, it creates a fire that burns with an intensity of 40 kW / m2 (up to 100 kW/m2 has been recorded), and depending on winds can move at 100km/h (60 mph).
This can quickly reduce a medium-sized mammal into ash. About 2.5kg of high-quality calcium, phosphorous and potassium, and often calcined to fine grey powder.
The eucalypts can easily survive their own fires (it only lasts ~5 minutes, not the ~1 hour of forest fires elsewhere), and then they use their roots to consume the animal remains.
Eucalypts are not just carnivorous, but pyrocarnivorous, and they hunt as a pack.