How Is A Human Like An Anchovy?

We’re at the same level of the food chain, technically:

[Ecologists] have a statistical way of calculating a species’ trophic level – its level, or rank, in a food chain. And interestingly enough, no one ever tried to rigorously apply this method to see exactly where humans fall. Until, that is, a group of French researchers recently decided to use food supply data from the U.N Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) to calculate human tropic level (HTL) for the first time. Their findings, published today in the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences, might be a bit deflating for anyone who’s taken pride in occupying the top position: On a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being the score of a primary producer (a plant) and 5 being a pure apex predator (a animal that only eats meat and has few or no predators of its own, like a tiger, crocodile or boa constrictor), they found that based on diet, humans score a 2.21 – roughly equal to an anchovy or pig. Their findings confirm common sense: We’re omnivores, eating a mix of plants and animals, rather than top-level predators that only consume meat.

To be clear, this doesn’t imply that we’re middle-level in that we routinely get eaten by higher-level predators—in modern society, at least, that isn’t a common concern—but that to be truly at the “top of the food chain,” in scientific terms, you have to strictly consume the meat of animals that are predators themselves.

(Photo of onion and anchovy pizza from Flickr user Elin B)