Cannibalism has a bad rap, but the more scientists learn about it, the more they discover it’s a vital part of nature.

The practice of eating one’s own kind is “wildly common across the animal kingdom,” says biologist Bill Schutt, author of Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History and professor emeritus of biology at Long Island University. It’s most often observed in invertebrates and fish, he says, but cannibalism occurs in every major animal group.

“For a long time the conventional wisdom amongst ecologists was that cannibalism was an aberrant behavior,” borne of the stress of captivity or unnatural lab conditions, adds Jay Rosenheim, an entomologist and nematologist at University of California, Davis.

“Only in recent decades has