Huge amounts of food are discarded each year, but “hardly anyone talks about what all that food waste is doing to wildlife,” says Yale e360. The story says, “a growing body of evidence suggests that our casual attitude about waste may be reshaping the way the natural world functions across much of the planet, inadvertently subsidizing some opportunistic predators and thus contributing to the decline of other species, including some that are threatened or endangered.” In one example, scientists theorize that a decline in the steelhead trout population in Monterey Bay in California may be linked to the growing population of Western gulls, a steelhead predator, “thanks to a steady diet of landfill garbage and fishery discards.” Yale e360 cites similar threatens to vulnerable animals in the western Mediterranean, the Mojave Desert and off the Alaskan coast.