Numlock Sunday: Christopher Lepczyk on the fearsome killers stalking the globe

Photo by Oscar Fickel on Unsplash

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Christopher A. Lepczyk about their story Beyond birds and mice, free‑ranging cats eat a surprising number of insects published in The Conversation. Here’s what I wrote about it:

Outdoor cats are tenacious hunters, and a new analysis of 533 studies on cat diet and predation events published over the course of a century finds that cats consume, at one point or another in the scientific record, nearly 2,100 different species of animal, of which 347 are in some capacity threatened, endangered or even extinct. While birds (47.1 percent of species consumed) were the most common prey, followed by reptiles (22.2 percent) and mammals (20.7 percent), at least seven percent of the species consumed by cats are insects and other invertebrates, mostly beetles. All told, 148 specific invertebrate species were identified across the studies as consumed by cats. Listen, domestication inherently inv…