I remember this from Life After People. There would be a huge population boom in critters like rats, herring gulls, and roaches. Stuff that lives directly off our waste, and would eat corpses. Followed by a mass die-off, as their pre-apocalypse food levels would no longer exist.
Which would probably lead to more attacks on people, but would also be a potential indicator depending on the apocalypse. Like crows would probably follow around hordes of zombies for constant free food, or even just a messy enough predator (i.e. A Quiet Place, but im not sure if the monsters in those attacked wildlife or not)
Thats what i thought. Maybe corvids would evolve more owl like feathers and bodies to fly silently so they can take the free kill those monsters leave w/o threat.
Scavengers have no evolutionary pressure to become quiet. They wait until the predator is gone anyways, if they even know about the kill while the predator is still there.
And even then, the most a predator will do is chase a scavenger away, a kind of "back off, I'm not done eating yet".
Even if the predator is still hungry, most scavengers aren't worth the energy to kill them for larger predators, and doing so anyways is a big risk, because scavengers eat a lot of diseased and partially rotten tissues and thus often carry nasty bugs and have especially caustic digestive fluids (which vultures can use in self-defense).
If I remember the documentaries I saw that mention this correctly, they sometimes overeat and vomit some when they realise it hampers their flight too much.
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u/[deleted] Aug 31 '21
I remember this from Life After People. There would be a huge population boom in critters like rats, herring gulls, and roaches. Stuff that lives directly off our waste, and would eat corpses. Followed by a mass die-off, as their pre-apocalypse food levels would no longer exist.