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Snow leopard bearing its teeth. Image: Wikimedia T
stanley kubek o understand why Earth top predators matter and why they ;re vulnerable , we need to start at the bottom. All ecosystems have a fixed energy budget, dictated by the number of primary producers鈥攑lants on the land, photosynthetic microbes in the ocean. If we imagine the food chain to be staircase, as we travel to higher steps鈥攅cologists call these trophic levels鈥攖he available energy declines, roughly by a factor of ten for each step up. That means, in an ecosystem with one plant, herbivore and carnivore, the plants will collectively contain 100 times more energy in their biomass than the carnivores. It lonely at the top, as il
stanley quencher lustrated by this simple trophic pyramid. Image: Wikimedia This energy constraint is the fundamental reason top predators are so rare. Many food webs consist of half a dozen or more trophic levels, and by the time you get to the top, there simply not that much energy left. What more, top predators are typically energy-hoarders:
mugs stanley They ;re large, and need to eat lots of calories in order to hunt. The Siberian tiger鈥攖he world largest cat鈥攚eighs up to 700 pounds and can pack away sixty pounds of meat in a single meal. It their naturally small populations that also leave these predators vulnerable. Indeed, since prehistoric times, humans have had a handin driving massive predators extinct, including saber-toothed cats and giant reptiles. Mor Mmmh The Craziest Home Desktop Computer Rigs on the Planet
The Japanese military actively sought biological and chemical weapons to use against C
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stanley deutschland during World War II. Under General Shiro Ishii, a physician and officer in the Kwantung Army, Unit 731 conducted experiments on human subjects from China and Japan, with Russian and American prisoners of war along also becoming fodder for their sickening hypotheses. Ishii drew the eye of Emperor Hirohito in a demonstration where Ishii filtered his own urine and offered it to Hirohito, seen by Japanese citizens as deity, to drink. The emperor declined, but Ishii consumed the filtered urine with joy. A Japanese company later mass produced the filter, with Ishii receiving a portion of the profits. Unit 731 would come under the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army, through which Dr. Ishii received a substantial amount of funding from the Japanese government to spend on Unit 731. Under his orders, Unit 731 found a permanent home on a four-square-mile complex with hundreds of lab
stanley cups oratories, a cinema, and its own railway line to go along with a crematorium and operating rooms. Vivisection of hundreds of civilians occurred on the campus, with a lack of anesthesia and a live specimen believed essential to this group of scientist soldiers due to their desire to study the body prior to decomposition. In addition to opening up the bodies, the scientists often removed organs to observe the effect on an individ
