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Predation is a biological interaction in which one organism, the predator, kills and eats another organism, its prey. It is one of a family of common feeding behaviours that includes parasitism and micropredation (which usually do not kill the host ) and parasitoidism (which always does, eventually).
The definition of preference will therefore impact on understanding switching. The most common definition of preference is the relationship between the ratio of prey in the environment and the ratio of prey in a predator's diet. It has been independently proposed a number of times and is described by the equation:
Raccoons (Procyon lotor) and skunks (Mephitis mephitis) are mesopredators.Here they share cat food in a suburban backyard.. The mesopredator release hypothesis is an ecological theory used to describe the interrelated population dynamics between apex predators and mesopredators within an ecosystem, such that a collapsing population of the former results in dramatically increased populations of ...
However, at low prey densities (the bottom of the curve) the rate of prey capture increases faster than linearly. This means that as the predator feeds and the prey type with the higher E/h becomes less abundant, the predator will start to switch its preference to the prey type with the lower E/h, because that type will be relatively more abundant.
The predation risk allocation hypothesis can help researchers learn how animals make behavioural responses to predators, since it is the first research that observes temporal variation in different risk situations. [7]
Intraguild predation is common in nature and widespread across communities and ecosystems. [2] Intraguild predators must share at least one prey species and usually occupy the same trophic guild, and the degree of IGP depends on factors such as the size, growth, and population density of the predators, as well as the population density and behavior of their shared prey. [1]
This one-predator/two-prey model has been explored by ecologists as early as 1925, but the term "apparent competition" was first coined by University of Florida ecologist Robert D. Holt in 1977. [ 13 ] [ 14 ] Holt found that field ecologists at the time were erroneously attributing negative interactions among prey species to niche partitioning ...
In the context of ecology, predation is considered to play a crucial and necessary role in ecosystems. [47] This has led some writers, such as Michael Pollan, to reject predation as being a moral problem at all, stating "predation is not a matter of morality or politics; it, also, is a matter of symbiosis". [48]