Fear of humans as apex predators has landscape-scale impacts

This experimental study demonstrated that the mere sound of human voices induced fear responses cascading from pumas down to mice in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Playback of human speech caused pumas to flee and reduce feeding, mesopredators to curtail activity, and smaller animals to alter foraging, showing that humans function as a super-predator whose perceived presence reshapes behaviour across an entire food web. The work provided striking evidence that fear of people, independent of actual killing, restructures ecological communities near human activity, deepening the landscape-of-fear framework central to understanding how urban and exurban felids and their prey behave.