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Comment by throwaway0a5e | Hacker News Reader

That's because we've spent several millennia figuring out how to live more and more densely and we do the same with our livestock.

If beavers invented a lifestyle that enabled them to live at densities up to thousands per square mile they'd compromise a hell of a lot of biomass too.

The fact that there's more humans doesn't imply anything about the other animal population (though I suspect that it's not good for the other animals though).

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I recently listened to a great podcast talking about beavers and it mentioned some population stats for North America (can't recall the numbers now). Beavers are right behind humans in terms of how they have shaped the land.

https://www.kuow.org/stories/the-wild-episode-4

You need to include our food production spaces when talking about population density for that to be a fair comparison. Our urban density is mirrored (and supported) by the sparseness of our farmland.

a) Counting areas where resources come from get complicated quick. Are you gonna count the ocean because the grizzly bear eats the salmon? Do Nile crocodiles get their population density counted based on the entire watershed they depend on?

b)There are about 50 people per square kilometer of land. Even adjusted for farmland humans are still gonna blow every other large predator out of the water. Even if you include commercial fisheries that still blows every other large predator out of the water. Maybe there's a couple seasonal localized concentrations of certain predators that are higher but nothing else comes close to that number.

Yeah but it's still clearly way better than wild animals of comparable mass

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