Search results for "Prey switching"
showing 3 items of 3 documents
Specialist predator in a multi-species prey community: boreal voles and weasels.
2011
Dissimilar vulnerabilities of different prey types and preferences of predators are factors likely to contribute to community dynamics. This may happen via differential individual properties of prey animals (e.g. vigilance, escape) or via habitat effects making hunting by a predator easier and more rewarding in some habitats, or both. Furthermore, community dynamics may be influenced by predator mediated apparent competition, in which an increase in one prey type has negative effects on another prey type indirectly via the shared predator. We summarize the current knowledge from the field in a model predator-prey system consisting of sympatric boreal vole species and their common specialist…
Pulsed-Resource Dynamics Constrain the Evolution of Predator-Prey Interactions
2011
Although temporal variability in the physical environment plays a major role in population fluctuations, little is known about how it drives the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of species interactions. We studied experimentally how extrinsic resource pulses affect evolutionary and ecological dynamics between the prey bacterium Serratia marcescens and the predatory protozoan Tetrahymena thermophila. Predation increased the frequency of defensive, nonpigmented prey types, which bore competitive costs in terms of reduced maximum growth rate, most in a constant-resource environment. Furthermore, the predator densities of the pulsed-resource environment regularly fluctuated above and below …
Strong antiapostatic selection against novel rare aposematic prey
2001
The evolution of aposematism, a phenomenon where prey species conspicuously advertise their unprofitability to predators, is puzzling. How did conspicuousness evolve, if it simultaneously increased the likelihood of an inexperienced predator to detect the prey and presumably kill it? Antiapostatic selection, where rare prey is predated relatively more often, is considered as another major difficulty for aposematism to evolve. However, the risk of being conspicuous in low frequencies has not been experimentally tested. We designed an experiment to test how frequency (4%, 12%, 32%) of conspicuous aposematic prey and its dispersion type (solitary vs. aggregated) affect an initial predation ri…