Humans: Earth’s most dominant species

Human beings are extraordinary creatures. I say this, because in the 4.5 billion year old history of the Earth, no other living organism has come close to what we have been able to achieve as a species. Now, I’m not talking about going into space or creating artificial intelligence; although these are as staggering an achievement as any. As a species, we have done some pretty amazing things at the ecological level as well.

I’m sure you have studied about the food chain and food web in your school. To the uninitiated, the food chain is a representation of how one organism eats another to obtain energy. Here’s an example-

A food web.

In nature, food chains rarely occur in isolation. We have something more complicated called the food web, which is a collection of food chains. An animal doesn’t feed on one particular organism (can you imagine if…