from the pen of icarus blake

There are a number of words that bother me in common parlance. Let’s begin with Superpredator:

The word “superpredator”, now almost exclusively used to report on wolf reintroduction in the American west, originated with a racially charged criminal theory in the 1990s designed to demonize juvenile offenders and imprison children for their entire lives. This theory has since been debunked, but laws passed based on it continue to result in minors tried and imprisoned as adults in adult prisons.

At the peak of the “superpredator” craze in 2008, 10,420 minors were incarcerated in adult prisons. This number had dropped to 2,250 by 2021 once we, as a society, started to come to our fucking senses. (Source)

There is no such thing as a “superpredator” in nature. There are hypercarnivores which are animals that gain 70% or more of their calories from meat. Your kitty Tiger is a hypercarnivore. Many insects are hypercarnivore. This is an actual ecological term describing a lifestyle animals actually live based on the percentage of meat in their diets.

Paleontological documentaries will occasionally hype an animal as a “superpredator”. You’ve heard it about tyrannosaurus rex, about spinosaurus aegypticus (before de-Jurassic Parkification), maybe even about anomalocaris if you’re a little crazy. This is an advertising trick. None of these critters are superpredators (although they are super cool predators), they are all likely hypercarnivores. Granted, the moniker of “superpredator” applied to extinct animals is meant to catch the public’s attention and draw them in by comparing them to, say, Godzilla.

When a modern animal is described as a “superpredator” it’s done so with an underlying current of demonization. There’s an implication that you would never want to come face to face with one of these things. Almost every use of this word I come across in the wild is used in reference to wolves, normally in publications targeting ranchers and farmers and intended to create an atmosphere of dread surrounding wolf reintroduction. It must be stated that wolves are not out to get you. Generally, wolves avoid humans and therefore their livestock unless you have left your animals woefully unattended and vulnerable. In this context, the word “superpredator” continues to push a factually incorrect political agenda. Glad to see we’re keeping the tradition up.