Sometimes , we homo let our dumb value foreclose us from take biological realities seriously . Take pooping , for representative : People have decide pooping is gross , even though it ’s a affair that most of us do literally every twenty-four hours . Now , some scientist think that even cannibalism is worth another hard look .
Cannibalism naturally occurs in circumstances of species of insects , Pisces , and even mammals . And despite our aversion to it as a so - called “ civilized ” species , cannibalism seems to dish a aim . A team led by UC San Diego investigator Benjamin Van Allen retrospect past research on cannibalism and come to the conclusion that it might help to bound disease spread in some populations .
“ We ’ve been calculate at cannibals individually , ” instead of cannibalism ’s effects on entire species , study co - generator Bret Elderd from Louisiana State University told Gizmodo . “ We ’re not recommend that cannibalism is in force , but instead that cannibalism is not mechanically detrimental . ”
The welfare of run through one ’s own sort is that members of the same species have all the food you need , in the right amount of money . But they also can carry the precise pathogens that can get you gruesome . Still , disease do n’t have thoroughgoing transmission rates , and there ’s no warranty a cannibal will get sick from deplete a sick relative .
The team looked at muckle of past inquiry on certain disease in several unlike species of insects , fish , and anuran . The declension armyworm , for example , can hurt from a specific computer virus that prevents it from growing magnanimous , making it look like a tasty bite to a healthy cat . But if healthy cat are exhaust sick ones , it tap a question : will the coinage succumb to the disease , or will fewer hosts aid the population to prevail ?
On reviewing the lit and after conducting experiments , the investigator find that cannibalism can in reality come down the preponderance of a pathogen in a specie . But this is not inevitably genuine . In communities where multiple individual feed on the same diseased corpse , the population could instead yield , due to the number of infections being greater than the act of infect server eaten . The squad publishedtheir workin The American Naturalist journal .
Elderd thinks that knowledge of the benefit of cannibalism to a population could help people deal with thing like pest outbreak . The fall Pseudaletia unipuncta , for example , is a plague both in the United States and Africa . But “ cannibalism can have potentially panoptic musical scale applications and impacts on biocontrol , ” he said . “ If you do n’t understand it , you ca n’t practice it as a tool to manage pest outbreaks . ”
As a final note , you obviously should n’t eat your neighbor . However , Elderd would like multitude to take another critical look at how cannibalism works in nature . It might yield some crucial scientific insights .
[ The American Naturalist ]
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