Erik E. Sotka Grice Marine Laboratory, College of Charleston, 205 Fort Johnson Road, Charleston, SC 29412, USA Correspondence: E-mail: [email protected] Abstract The study of interactions between small invertebrates and their larger plant and animal hosts has a long tradition. One persistent theme within this literature is that spatiallysegregated populations of terrestrial and freshwater inverte...

Received wisdom has it that search is ineeective in elded AI systems; it is argued that realistic problem spaces are simply too large to allow eeective search. We suggest that this is because search-based techniques fall prey to early mistakes, making fatal errors suuciently early in the search that backtrack-based techniques are incapable of correcting them. We describe four general techniques...

Prey (N) dependence [g(N)], predator (P) dependence [g(P) or g(N,P)], and ratio dependence [f(P/N)] are often seen as contrasting forms of the predator’s functional response describing predator consumption rates on prey resources in predator–prey and parasitoid–host interactions. Analogously, prey-, predator-, and ratio-dependent functional responses are apparently alternative functional respon...

Generalization is at the heart of many aspects of behavioral ecology; for foragers it can be seen as an essential feature of learning about potential prey, because natural populations of prey are unlikely to be perfectly homogenous. Aposematic signals are considered to aid predators in learning to avoid a class of defended prey. Predators do this by generalizing between the appearance of prey t...

Many populations are threatened or endangered because of excessive predation resulting from individuals' inability to recognize, avoid, or escape alien predators. Such prey naïveté is often attributed to the absence of prior experience and co-evolution between native prey and introduced predators. Many reintroduction programs focus on reducing predation rate by excluding introduced predators, a...

Bemisia tabaci biotype B has become a major pest, causing serious losses to many agricultural crops worldwide. Chrysopa pallens is an important polyphagous predator of B. tabaci on different agricultural crops. In the present study, prey consumption by C. pallens was determined with feeding on un-parasitized and Encarsia formosa parasitized B. tabaci biotype B prey on tomato host plant at contr...

Much of an animal's health status, life history, and behavior are dictated by interactions with its endogenous and exogenous bacterial communities. Unfortunately, interactions between hosts and members of their resident bacterial community are often ignored in animal behavior and behavioral ecology. Here, we aim to identify the nature of host-microbe interactions in a nonmodel organism, the Afr...

1. Most trophic interaction theory assumes that all predators are an abstract form of risk to which prey respond in a quantitatively similar manner. This conceptualization can be problematic because recent empirical work demonstrates that variation in the responses of prey to different predators can play a key role in structuring communities and regulating ecosystem function. 2. Predator identi...