speculative biology/fantasy/fictionalized large predators that kill indiscriminately and don't eat what they kill drive me up the fucking wall. it is so, so dangerous and exhausting to be a large predator. you don't want to get into a fight, you don't want to exert too much energy, because if you fuck up you can die. and once you manage to kill something, you eat it. you don't go and kill the rest of the herd, you scare off the rest of the herd and eat the thing you killed until something scares you off.
did you know tigers only have a 10% success rate as hunters? TIGERS.
There are exceptions if a predator has a bunch of easy prey in a confined space (fox in a chicken coop for example) and some mammalian predators will kill extra and store or bury them for later if the pickings are easy.
So for fantasy/sci-fi creatures, this behaviour might be understandable if the predator gets into a small underground base or space station or what have you and the humans are unarmed and not much of a threat to it. But yeah, it should at least be shown to stop and eat one or two of its first victims before it begins stocking up the larder.
Concept: A creature gets into the underground base, eats a couple of people. But it doesn't stop there because the rest of you are sitting ducks and it plans to save you for later. Walls and other obstacles can't stop it, its claws tear through anything in its way. You reason that it's a fossorial predator, and it's clearly not built for a pursuit over open ground, so you and the other survivors make for the exit up to the surface...
And run straight into the ambush of a different kind of predator. It's far taller and has longer limbs than the other one, this one *is* built for the chase, but a whole group of you popping up out of the ground one by one means it barely has to put in effort at all. It will eat well for weeks.
You realise, too late, that this is no unfortunate coincidence. The surface predator was working with the burrower to drive you out here. These creatures may not be sapient, but they appear to have a strategy. Some kind of symbiotic relationship, perhaps?
You never stood a chance.
Anyway, you just met the sci-fi horror version of these guys:
[ID: A photo of a coyote and an american badger walking together on a prairie. End ID]
