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Predators affect their ecosystems not only directly by eating their own prey, but by indirect means such as reducing predation by other species, or altering the foraging behaviour of a herbivore, as with the biodiversity effect of wolves on riverside vegetation or sea otters on kelp forests.
Predation is a short-term interaction, in which the predator, here an osprey, kills and eats its prey. Short-term interactions, including predation and pollination, are extremely important in ecology and evolution. These are short-lived in terms of the duration of a single interaction: a predator kills and eats a prey; a pollinator transfers ...
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]
Yet without the predators, the herbivorous prey would explode in numbers, wipe out the dominant plants, and dramatically alter the character of the ecosystem. The exact scenario changes in each example, but the central idea remains that through a chain of interactions, a non-abundant species has an outsized impact on ecosystem functions.
“Gaiasia is big, and it is abundant, and it seems to be the primary predator in its ecosystem.” ... In addition to seeking more fossil examples of the species, the researchers are also curious ...
Trophic cascades are powerful indirect interactions that can control entire ecosystems, occurring when a trophic level in a food web is suppressed. For example, a top-down cascade will occur if predators are effective enough in predation to reduce the abundance, or alter the behavior of their prey, thereby releasing the next lower trophic level from predation (or herbivory if the intermediate ...
Predator partitioning occurs when species are attacked differently by different predators (or natural enemies more generally). For example, trees could differentiate their niche if they are consumed by different species of specialist herbivores, such as herbivorous insects. If a species density declines, so too will the density of its natural ...
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 ...