Human hunters are no substitute for vanishing apex predators.

The global decline of apex predator populations risks the loss of their crucial ecological functions. This raises a pressing yet contentious question: can human hunters, often termed 'super-predators', functionally substitute for the complex regulation once provided by their natural counterparts? To investigate this question, we analysed 30,778 camera-trap records from 400 sites in southwestern China (2017-2021). Using propensity score matching (PSM) to control for environmental heterogeneity, we compared wildlife communities across hunter-dominated, apex predator-dominated, and predator-absent sites. Our results showed that hunters fail to replicate the collective and individual ecological functions of natural apex predators (dhole, Asian golden cat, and clouded leopard). Apex predator sites supported the highest species richness and abundance, with 33.0% and 32.5% more species and 49.8% and 44.8% greater abundance than hunter-dominated and predator-absent sites, respectively. The prey species-site network was the most robust at apex predator sites and the weakest at hunter-dominated sites, indicating that hunting increases prey vulnerability to cascading extirpations following habitat loss. Compared with hunter-dominated sites, sites dominated by single-apex predators had distinct species compositions and dominant prey. Prey exhibited prolonged avoidance (up to 2.6 times longer) of hunters compared with any apex predator, coinciding with the weakest network robustness at hunter-dominated sites. Collectively, our findings provide compelling evidence that human hunters cannot replace apex predators in sustaining biodiversity and promoting stable spatial patterns. Our work therefore strongly supports the conservation of natural apex predators and offers crucial insights for regulating human hunting in ecosystem management.