We managed to get in touch with William, the man behind Animals With Powerful Auras, and he was kind enough to have a little chat with us about it.
"There's no strict process [behind running the page], it's just pictures I like or think will be funny," William told Bored Panda. "Sometimes I Photoshop stuff, but I'm focusing on my other pages a bit more since my post reach got reduced after my last zucc."
"My posting style has always just been kind of stream of consciousness. I curate them from Twitter or other groups or they're fan submissions and I usually don't know the origin. No real rhyme or reason to it other than 'this looks fun.'"
William also runs a store dedicated entirely to Animals With Powerful Auras and actually does all of the art for it himself.
If we were to pinpoint which animals are actually dominating everyone in the real world, we'd be talking about apex predators, also known as alpha predators or top predators. They're the ones at the top of the food chain. But even they don't have it easy.
A few years ago, William J. Ripple, an ecologist at Oregon State University who has been studying gray wolves, cougars, and other top predators for decades, reviewed the status of the planet's 31 largest carnivores—a list that includes lions, tigers, and bears, but also sea otters, dingoes, and lynxes—and found that 24 of these animals are in decline, and 17 have been confined to less than half of their original ranges. "They are some of the world's most admired mammals and, ironically, some of the most imperiled," the team explained.
Sadly, humans play a big part in it. We drive these animals away, we destroy their habitats, and we hunt them for fur, trophies, and pseudo-medicine.
But as Ripple worked on his review, he realized that we also harm large carnivores in a way that's not necessarily obvious straight away: we threaten their prey. "Without conservation of the prey, we cannot have conservation of carnivores," Ripple said.
Ripple's Ph.D. student, Christopher Wolf, began gathering data. He focused on the 17 largest land carnivores, particularly those that get more than 70% of their diet from meat. He then worked out which animals each hunter eats, and assessed the status of each victim.
For 5 of the 17 predators—the clouded leopard, Sunda clouded leopard, tiger, dhole (a wild Asian dog), and Ethiopian wolf—the results weren't promising. Large proportions of their prey are threatened, ranging from 40 percent for the Ethiopian wolf to 60 percent for the clouded leopard. "The level of threat their prey was facing was surprising to us," Wolf said.
Apex predators are central to the functioning of ecosystems, the regulation of disease, and the maintenance of biodiversity. So we really need to cherish animals with powerful auras!
