Posts Tagged: predator

Prey switching occurs when a generalist predator kills disproportionately more of an abundant prey species and correspondingly spares a rarer species. Although this behaviour is a classic stabilizing mechanism in food web models, little is known about its operation in … read more

Predation rate (PR) and kill rate are both fundamental statistics for understanding predation. However, relatively little is known about how these statistics relate to one another and how they relate to prey population dynamics. We assess these relationships across three … read more

Predator kills rate (i.e., kills per predator per time) is routinely presupposed to depend exclusively on prey density. However, per capita rates of killing may typically depend on the density of both prey and predator. Unfortunately, our perception of many … read more

A surprisingly general pattern at very large scales casts light on the link between ecosystem structure and function. We show a robust scaling law that emerges uniquely at the level of whole ecosystems and is conserved across terrestrial and aquatic … read more

Large predators are declining worldwide primarily due to hunting and persecution by humans, driven in large part by the livestock industry. Some ranchers are transitioning to “predator-friendly” farming by adopting nonlethal predator deterrents. On very large rangeland properties, such as … read more

Finding effective ways of conserving large carnivores is widely recognized as a priority in conservation. However, there is disagreement about the most effective way to do this, with some favoring top-down ‘command and control’ approaches and others favoring collaboration. Arguments … read more