Predators can influence prey abundance and traits by direct consumption, as well as by non-consumptive effects of visual, olfactory, or tactile cues. The strength of these non-consumptive effects (NCEs) can be influenced by a variety of factors, including predator foraging mode, temporal variation in predator cues, and the density of competing prey. Testing the relative importance of these fact...

BACKGROUND The metacommunity framework is crucial to the study of functional relations along environmental gradients. Changes in resource grain associated with increasing habitat fragmentation should generate uncoupled responses of interacting species with contrasted dispersal abilities. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Here we tested whether the intensity of parasitism was modified by increasi...

To examine the indirect effects of fishing on energy allocation in non-target prey species, condition and reproductive potential were measured for five representative species (two-spot red snapper Lutjanus bohar, arc-eye hawkfish Paracirrhites arcatus, blackbar devil Plectroglyphidodon dickii, bicolour chromis Chromis margaritifer and whitecheek surgeonfish Acanthurus nigricans) from three reef...

Recently, some biologists have argued that the ratio-dependent predator-prey model is more appropriate than the Gauss-type models for modelling predator-prey interactions where predation involves searching processes. This is strongly supported by numerous laboratory experiments and observations [1, 2, 3, 4, 10, 11, 12]. Many authors [1, 5, 7, 13, 14] have observed that the ratio-dependent preda...

In this talk we discuss the predator-prey models with harvesting of the prey. We briefly introduce the basic Lotka-Volterra predator-prey model and different harvesting strategies. Then we focus on two types of harvesting functions, and combine them with two types of predator-prey models, one with exponential growth of the prey and the other one with logistic growth of the prey. For each type o...

The spatial distributions of predators and prey can be shaped by both intraand interspecific games. Most predator–prey studies, however, have ignored the interspecific game by focusing on how either predators or prey distribute themselves while holding the distribution of the other species fixed. We use genetic algorithms to examine how the distributional outcome of the game between predators a...

In this paper we study a Lotka-Volterra predator-prey system with prey logistic growth under the telegraph noise. The telegraph noise switches at random two prey-predator models. The aim of this work is to determine the subset of omega-limit set of the system and show out the existence of a stationary distribution. We also focus on persistence of the predator and thus we look for conditions tha...

This paper investigates the time delayed nonautonomous predator-prey models. The cause of the time delay considered here is due to gestation on the consumption of an infected prey by the predator. The local stability conditions are obtained by linearizing the models around the equilibrium points. Also the occurrence of Hopf bifurcation is proven analytically, corroborated with the computational...

Maximum food-chain length has been correlated with resource availability, ecosystem size, environmental stability and colonization history. Some of these correlations may result from environmental effects on predator-prey body size ratios. We investigate relationships between maximum food-chain length, predator-prey mass ratios, primary production and environmental stability in marine food webs...