It was the first fatal bear attack in Yellowstone since 1986. If you want to avoid being eaten, a new study finds that lions take advantage of their better night vision and most often attack humans in the nights after the full moon, when the moon rises an hour or more after sunset.īears: Earlier this summer, a hiker was attacked and killed by a grizzly bear in Yellowstone National Park. But when I think of man-eating cats, my mind goes to the lions of Africa, and stories like the movie The Ghost and the Darkness. And tiger attacks in India may be on the rise as their habitat shrinks. Just this week a leopard in India was taken down after going on a rampage and mauling several people. Leopards, lions and tigers are the scary man-eaters of the cat world. (That said, we’ve had enough reminders lately that these species are important to their ecosystems, important enough that we need to keep them around.) Here are the predators that humans had best avoid:Ĭats: We’re not talking about your cute little housecat (though a nasty scratch or bite can be troublesome). Humans and our ancestors have been dealing with that problem for forever (check out the top 10 deadliest animals of our evolutionary past), and while many of us are able to live our lives without ever coming in contact with a deadly predator, there are still enough encounters to remind us that humans are not always the top of the food web. But why do we get rid of predators in the first place? Some of them go after things we care about, like our livestock, but an even more understandable motivation for eliminating a species is that it attacks (and eats) us.
We started out Predator Week on Monday with a study that looked at what happens when predators disappear from an ecosystem.