this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2025
281 points (85.8% liked)
Witches VS Patriarchy
1205 readers
340 users here now
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
... insects?
It's the first time I hear of cats endangering insects.
Hard for me to imagine them being efficient enough at hunting them or caring enough for them it would matter.
Couldn't find anything with a quick search either, do you have some source?
So you definitely wanna mention mammals and reptiles way before insects.
It's also regional, in Europe and North America insects don't really register. I assume the cause would be comparatively few larger insects.
This also only measures numbers of species, so does not directly mention individual counts nor factor in size of the animals. Biomass eaten would be a far better measurement here, and I would expect see insects placed far lower due to smaller body-sizes.
To me this doesn't seem like cats are a notable danger to insect life.
That is quite obviously not what I said.
It's pretty shitty to argue in bad faith like that.
The study tells nothing of danger, it tells of consumption. This might come as a shocker but in nature everything consumes something, often something alive. When talking about endangering, that means destroying the ecological balance, so by reducing a species numbers or even bringing it to extinction. It means an unsustainable load.
Roaming cats eat a lot of birds, enough to change the balance of the ecosystem.
The study now told us that cats eat comparatively a lot fewer insects in number. However smaller animals have vastly greater population numbers, a more constant value across species is biomass.
To simplify, if your insects are 1000x smaller that means you need to eat 1000x as many to cause the same damage.
I am calling the amount of insects consumed by roaming cats likely sustainable based on what the study presents. Cats don't hunt enough insects for it to matter to the entire ecosystem. Not (only) because they hunt fewer insects than rodents or birds apparently, but (much more) because they would need to hunt thousands of times more insects for a similar impact as they have on birds. Just due to the difference in population numbers stemming from the difference in size.