Running on rocket fuel

In the world of “cut and thrust,” humans try to bank money to obtain financial security, and often form cooperatives to reduce risks and increase gains. Many humans also end up in poverty traps, where because of meager resources and an increasingly high cost of living they find themselves unable to raise their heads above the parapet and “never make it.” Over a 20-year period, Gregory Rasmussen, currently at Lady Margaret Hall Oxford, intensively studied every move of African wild dogs in Zimbabwe to the extent of “living with packs” for periods of up to a month in order to work out how much energy they were spending eating, sleeping, and running. He came to the conclusion that “whilst to date we have seen poverty traps as being something intrinsically human, they are not!”

Nature’s currency is energy, and in theory, keeping the cost of living low leaves more in the “piggy bank” for reproduction. However, staying in nature’s fast lane isn’t easy, and necessitates that evolution comes up with a “business plan” to bank energy (nature’s surrogate for wealth!) to survive. …The results from this study highlighted a weakness in the business plan, for when the financial energetic annual accounts were done, the benefits of having fewer individuals to feed in a smaller packs was outweighed by the greater costs of running. …this study highlighted an Achilles heel where energetic poverty translated into reproductive poverty, and a vicious circle whereby small packs have fewer pups, leading to even smaller packs, and driving them into an extinctive vortex.

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