Why not kill all the sharks and alligators?

Question

Other predators and scavengers would pick up the slack, what purpose do they serve?

Answer 1

They are there as part of the food chain.
The sharks and the alligators eats usually the old, helpless, or sick animals. The sharks and the alligators prevent overpopulation.
They have the right to be here, just like the wolves.
When we had gotten rid of too many wolves, the deer overpopulated. As the end result, more than half of the deer starved to death.

Answer 2

Other scavengers and predators won't pick up the slack. Alligators and sharks have a niche in their environments that is pretty unique and hard to fill, no matter what species each is. Removing them would take the ecosystem of the area off balance.

Answer 3

Your logic and reasoning is flawed.... alligators/crocodiles and sharks have been around for millions of years and remain essentially unchanged since that time. The reason being that they are perfectly suited to thier role in the ecosystem and serve thier purpose so fully that there has been no need to change thier design. You ask what purpose do they serve... well thier purpose is simply to do what they were designed to do, which is prey upon other creatures keeping thier populations in check and ensuring that future generations of thier prey will have enough food and habitat to survive. The concept you seem not to be able to grasp is that predator and prey do not hate each other, nor do they truly harm one another... in fact they enrich eachothers lives in ways that sometimes seem unfathomable until you truly open your eyes and understand. Predators strengthen the gene pools of thier prey by culling the sick, genetically defected and generally poorly adapted members of the species. Also they keep the populations of the prey species at the proper levels which prevents overpopulation leading to destruction of habitat and starvation and death of the prey species. In turn both predator and prey are stimulated to become stronger and smarter and better at dealing with one another.....
You say other predators and scavengers would pick up the slack, but that is untrue to say the least.... there are more than one species of both sharks and alligator/crocodiles and each one is specifically suited to certain prey and certain habitat they fill a niche in the ecosystem that they have claimed as thier own for far to long to allow any other creatures to take thier place and fufill thier purpose. I can cite as an example how people with your attitude exterminated wolves from Yellowstone national park, they had the same idea that really wolves served no purpose and other animals would adapt etc... well it didn't work and the results were devastating.... the elk and other large herbivore populations got so out of control that it caused the near extirpation of many plant species including Willows, which then led to the erosion of waterways, which then led to the creatures of the water being affected negatively and ultimately led to the elk and other herbivores to have a population explosion which caused them to eat all of thier food supply causing them and many other animals to starve to death. Also disease ran rampant as there were no predators to cull the sick so the animals were spreading it back and forth. Basically the loss of only one predator the wolf was destroying the entire ecosystem of Yellowstone..... The only solution to rectify the situation was the reintroduction of wolves imported from Canada (my country) immediately results were seen and the balance of the ecosystem was restored, elk populations are back to normal, their food supply was able to regrow, species of plants started to make a comeback and more diversity of animals and plants was reestablished. Humans learned an important lesson from this... you cannot play god and decide that some animals should be eliminated, mothernature does that on her own and has been doing it for millennia without our interference, you are not to decide what is important and what is not because nature has its own balance and predator and prey belong together, because one cannot thrive without the other.....

Answer 4

Lets take a little trip into the swamps of Florida. You see a gator sitting on the shoreline. You think, hey you know that thing is pointless lets kill em all. but that gator is an important ecological piece of the circle of life. I mean lets say a gator eats 20 fish per diem(day) and there are 50 gators living in a certain swamp, then there will be 1000 fish eaten per diem. If there were no gators, then the fish population would increase greatly and overpoulate the food supply for the fish and they would all die out float to the surface and rot causeing a great stench. so gators really do actually do something because there are no other creatures that will eat fish or most anything in the water and also various critters on land. sharks are similar in that they are like vacuum cleaners in fish schools. they control populations of sea critters just like humans do with hunting seasons. Hunters only preserve the land and make it so there are manageable numbers of deer and other animals for people and critters to live amongst each other with out really interfering with them. sorry for rambling at the end im really tired and going to bed

Answer 5

Nature abhors a vacuum. Other predators and scavengers would grow larger to occupy the ecological niche, and you'd end up in a few million years with the same general type of animals.

But in the meantime, you'd have upset a delicate balance which may cause the proliferation of some really annoying animals that is presently kept in check. Do you want to run the risk?

Answer 6

All predators have a purpose in nature. Where I live, the natural predators were mountain lions. They have all been killed or "relocated." Now people complain because there are always cars hitting deer. When any population is allowed to grow exponentially without a natural predator (or birth control!), you run into problems.... disease, famine, drought..... look at third world countries.

Answer 7

......! : 90% of the world shark population has been yet killed.
Do we want to save someone for the future generations?
About "gators",by the way,are important too in order to make part of the biological chain in their environment.
Take a ring of the chain apart,nothing could happen,too many(rings) ,and something bad could happen .
I'm not an extremist in this issue but,after having the right information from specialists,I started to think differently about such predators.
May be,we should be concerned more about our behaviour,than what is happening in the animal world.
Sorry for my bad english:I'm from another country.

Answer 8

One thing is in the intrest of science , sharks have an immunity system that protects it from desease such as cancer and we are studying this aspect to see if 1 day we can tap into it for humans,, but for alligators i dont know i dont like their looks and i've heard that reptiles have no growth limits , in other words they just keep getting bigger and bigger///

Answer 9

If all the sharks and alligators were killed, then the larger predators would just take their place and we'd still have the same problem.'

Answer 10

how dare u say that i luv animals !! but sharks is not my tang but i would never do that even sharks kill people and other animals there still sin! ITS JUST LIKE WHEN U EAT MEAT OR CHICKEN OR FISH I DUNT CARE BUT THAT HOW THE LIL POOR ANIMALS FEEL I NOE THERE NOT ALIVE OR ANYTHING BUT THINK! if u kill any animals u dunt noe how much sin u will get!!! if u walk down the street and kill an ant by accident thats no sin but kiilling it on perpouse is a sin!!! so please never kill an animla


yous truly: animal lover!