this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2025
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Witches VS Patriarchy

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[โ€“] finitebanjo@piefed.world -1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I'm sorry that you don't consider insects a valuable part of the ecosystem and therefor worth mentioning. Idk where you got the idea they aren't a danger to insects when the study just told you they were.

[โ€“] Redjard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 days ago

I'm sorry that you don't consider insects a valuable part of the ecosystem

That is quite obviously not what I said.
It's pretty shitty to argue in bad faith like that.


The study tells nothing of danger, it tells of consumption. This might come as a shocker but in nature everything consumes something, often something alive. When talking about endangering, that means destroying the ecological balance, so by reducing a species numbers or even bringing it to extinction. It means an unsustainable load.

Roaming cats eat a lot of birds, enough to change the balance of the ecosystem.
The study now told us that cats eat comparatively a lot fewer insects in number. However smaller animals have vastly greater population numbers, a more constant value across species is biomass.

To simplify, if your insects are 1000x smaller that means you need to eat 1000x as many to cause the same damage.

I am calling the amount of insects consumed by roaming cats likely sustainable based on what the study presents. Cats don't hunt enough insects for it to matter to the entire ecosystem. Not (only) because they hunt fewer insects than rodents or birds apparently, but (much more) because they would need to hunt thousands of times more insects for a similar impact as they have on birds. Just due to the difference in population numbers stemming from the difference in size.