Question: have you eaten anything strange from the rainforest e.g sipders?!

Murray Collins answered on 17 Mar 2011:

Hmm… some mushrooms, a bit of piranha in the amazon (I didn’t particularly want to but it would have been rude to refuse my hosts!) and catfish (jumped into the boat also when I was in the Amazon, and the driver killed it).

In fact one of the major problems for wildlife in the jungle is that there are more and more people who want to eat that wildlife. Unfortunately, in general the rate at which people want to eat the wildlife is higher than the rate that wildlife can reproduce, which means that people are eating their way through the world’s remaining wild animals.

We are continuing to do this in all environments, and particularly the sea. Even despite having bigger boats and bigger nets than ever before, the total global fish catch is going down. We have already caught many of the big fish and big animals on earth and eaten them! This is a major problem in conservation biology: the human population is continuing to grow very fast. There are some 7billion people on the planet now, and we expect there to be another 1 or 2 billion in the next three decades. As we get richer, people expect to be able to eat more, better food (more animal protein).But unfortunately there are limits to what the land and sea can naturally produce. So there is increased competition for remaining fish and other remaining wild animals, and remaining land that might be farmed. If we continue like this, we will be left with much less to eat in the future. Already we are finding jellyfish and squid taking over in fisheries which were formerly full of big fish. Because we have caught and eaten so many of the fish it leaves room for the jellyfish and squid numbers to grow. Would you rather eat jellyfish and chips or cod and chips? If we want to have cod and chips and other natural resources in the future, (including wildlife that we enjoy looking at), we need to be much much better at managing what we have now. That’s where environmental economics can help, and is why I am interested in it!

Bit of a deviation from your question, but this the kind of thing that wildlife and conservation biologists must think about.