Cannibalism has been shown to make a species weaker
Cannibals are rare in the animal kingdom partly because eating your relatives makes you sick, say researchers in the US who have tested the idea for the first time.
For years, biologists have wondered why cannibalism is rare. In theory, eating your own kind can give nutritional and competitive advantages, although communities of cannibals might also have a tendency to wipe themselves out. One answer, they reckoned, was that animals avoid cannibalism to stop the spread of species-specific pathogens.
To test this theory, a team led by David Pfennig of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill created “diseased” larvae of the cannibalistic tiger salamander,
The larvae that ate diseased larvae of their own species grew less quickly and were less likely to survive metamorphosis than all the other animals, Pfennig’s team will report in a forthcoming issue of
Via NewScientist