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The widely held belief that humans are at the top of the food chain is actually wrong. Humans are nowhere near the top. Ecologists rank species by their diets using a metric called the trophic level. Plants, which produce their own food, are given a rank of 1. Herbivores, which eat only plants, are ranked 2. Pure apex predators (animals that eat only other animals and have no predators of their own, like tigers, crocodiles, boa constrictors, polar bears, and orcas) rank a 5.5.


A team of French researchers used food supply data from the U.N Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) to calculate the human trophic level (HTL) for every country for which data is available, and their results were published December 2, 2013 in the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences. They found that based on diet, humans score a 2.21, roughly equal to anchovies and pigs.

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10y ago

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