Starvation is the Predator that Never Sleeps

From The Well-Dressed Ape by Hannah Holmes:

For many ... species, starvation is the predator that never sleeps. In Sweden, one study found that a staggering one in five roe deer dies of hunger. On Isle Royale, a national park in Lake Superior, wolves perish of starvation and violence (which biologists link to food shortages) at a rate ranging from 18 percent to 57 percent in a year. The snowy owls of Alberta, Canada, do little better, with starvation killing just 14 percent of the dead owls in the province. But among Wyoming's female moose, malnutrition accounts for 60 percent of deaths. Starvation happens. It qualifies, in the view of wildlife biologists, as "death by natural causes.'

.... The causes of starvation in humans are identical to those in other animals, although we don't consider them "natural." One is meteorological. One year the rains simply don't arrive on schedule, and the humans who depend on grain suddenly find themselves in the same boat as the rabbits who depend on grass and the herons who depend on tadpoles. Territorial conflict is another cause: In the Sudan, the Arab Janja Weed push the Black Africans off their traditional territory, and the Black Africans promptly begin starving. In Yellowstone National Park, the same fate awaits a weak wolf that a stronger pack bullies away from the elk herd. And both of these catalysts, meteorology and conflict, burn hotter when they spark in a dense population. In Ethiopia, the human reproduction rate has been growing since 1960. Each generation of females is producing more offspring than the generation before. The population is rising faster than almost anywhere on Earth, and it's also bumping up against some of the world's most erratic weather. Ethiopia's droughts have become legendary, and as more and more Homo sapiens crowd the unstable habitat, the starvation risk soars."

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