Yeah that hit me a few minutes after I posted. My shame is great.
Maybe a place to start would be the wikipedia entry onApex predators- here’s the index list. If that’s not the sort of thing you’re after then obviously you’ll need to work on asking more clearly.
Man, I’m dying to know what the OP meant by “highest level”. I count 4 guesses so far: highest in intelligence, highest in trophic level, highest latitude and highest altitude (although maybe the last two were jokes). I’ll add a fifth, maybe he meant “highest” evolutionarily, under the erroneous assumption that that is a meaningful concept.
When someone says “highest level” I think of D&D. But I don’t think the entries in the Monster Manual have a character level specified, although I’m sure some (many, most?) are carnivorous. So the answer depends on what monsters the DM has created for your game.
I’m reasonably sure that Tiamat is primarily carnivorous, and she’s probably also in the habit of killing her food in the process of eating it. And she probably also rates highly in trophic level, intelligence, and altitude, though I’m not sure of her typical latitude. On the other hand, the Tarrasque, while lower level, eats a lot more than her.
Or those who eat snails because they’re yummy and fun to eat. In S France/N Spain, hunting snails is more common and more commonly done by those who will cook and eat them than the same for other local edible animals such as rabbit or boar: snail-hunting only needs working hands and feet and some sort of container.
Wikipedia notes that Polar Bears and Orcas have a fractional tropic level at about 5.0, the highest possible. Which means they are carnivores that eat carnivores that in turn eat carnivores. I guess that means eg Polar Bears eat seals which eat sea birds which eat something that eats plants.
So who wins in the Octagon, the Orca, the Polar Bear, or the Roman Legionary?
The seals eat fish that probably eat zooplankton (tiny animals in the plankton) that eat phytoplankton (tiny plants or cyanobacteria).
Polar Bears FTW!
Chimpanzees
I have decided animals that kill and eat their mates after mating are almost the worse. Except, maybe hamsters who routinely eat their babies.
Just checking in.
We aren’t any closer to knowing what the original question meant, are we?
But regardless, the answer seems to be polar bears, which is nice since they’ve been having such a tough time of it recently.
From the OP:
Seals eat birds?
They eat penguins (and worse). But those aren’t the same seals being eaten by polar bears.
Hey, spoiler!
Wiki: All pinnipeds are carnivorous and predatory. As a whole, they mostly feed on fish and cephalopods, followed by crustaceans and bivalves, and then zooplankton and endothermic (“warm-blooded”) prey like sea birds.[94] While most species are generalist and opportunistic feeders, a few are specialists. Pinniped - Wikipedia
To maintain the Polar Bear’s distinguished trophic position, we have to place seals on the 4th trophic level. That means that the seals have to mostly eat carnivores, rather than plant-eaters. Colibri clarified:
I keep thinking of the flavor text on the old school Grey Ogre card from Magic: The Gathering:
“The Ogre philosopher Gnerdel believed the purpose of life was to live as high on the food chain as possible. She refused to eat vegetarians, preferring to live entirely on creatures that preyed on sentient beings.”
I, a human, have eaten live octopus. A chef with a knife cut it into little pieces 10 seconds before, but it was still alive and wriggling when I ate it. You have to chew the tentacles well so the suckers don’t grab ahold of your esophagus on the way down.
I didn’t do this out of necessity, but because it’s tasty.
Also, people eat snails on purpose.
Alive?