Examples of Persistence Hunting.

Greetings. Throughout the Earth's long history of complex life forms, predatory animals have utilized several techniques in the effort to catch and dispatch prey animals in their respective habitats and environments. Some iconic species have been highly effective ambush predators, with modern-day wolves, cheetah, and the extinct theropods allosaurus, ceratosaurus, and velociraptor being charter members of the "ambush club." 

Thylacinus cynocephalus, better known as the Thylacine, or erroneously as the Tasmanian Wolf, was (is?) a practitioner of persistence hunting. A large marsupial native to the island of Tasmania, the Thylacine slowly stalked its prey until it forced eventual exhaustion, dispatching its quarry soon thereafter. With the species' claimed extinction, which is still hotly debated, the landscape of Tasmania has been left void of an apex predatory species, a situation which is the direct result of destructive human activities. 

Some well-known species were anything but ambush predators, practicing a technique known as persistence hunting. Persistence hunting, also known as endurance hunting or long-distance hunting, is a variant of pursuit predation in which an individual predator will bring down a prey animal via indirect means, such as exhaustion, heat illness or injury. Hunters of this type will typically display physical adaptions for distance running, such as longer legs, temperature regulation, and specialized cardiovascular systems. Some endurance hunters may prefer to injure prey in an ambush before the hunt and rely on tracking to find their quarry, a technique used by the extant Komodo Dragon.

Persistence hunting can be accomplished by simple walking, but with a 30% to 74% lower rate of success than by running or intermittent running. Additionally, while requiring 10% to 30% less energy, persistence hunting takes twice as long.

Humans beings are some of the best long-distance runners in the animal kingdom, with some hunter/gatherer tribes continuing to practice this form of hunting into modern times. Homo sapiens have the proportionally longest legs of any species of human known to science, but all members of genus Homo have cursorial (limbs adapted for running) adaptions not found in more arboreal hominids such as chimpanzees and orangutans. An extinct species of hominid, Homo erectus, practiced persistence hunting, slowly persuing quarry until it expired from blood loss or exhaustion. H. erectus, which went extinct only 108,000 years ago, lost the majority of its body hair to enhance heat dissipation during persistence hunting, which explains the origin of a characteristic feature of all subsequent species of Homo, including our own species. 

Thank you for your time and consideration.