Cannibals and their victims often share common resources and thus potentially compete. Smaller individuals are often competitively superior to larger ones because of size-dependent scaling of foraging and metabolic rates, while larger ones may use cannibalism to counter this competition. We study the interplay between cannibalism and competition using a size-structured population model in which...

The effect of stocking density (10, 31.6 and 100 larvae l ; three replicates per treatment) on the day-by-day dynamics of survival, growth and cannibalism was examined in sibling perch larvae reared from eyed-egg stage in 100-l cages (16L:8D, 20.0F 0.5 jC, O2z 6.0 mg l ; feeding in excess with live Artemia nauplii during the photophase) during the first 3 weeks of exogenous feeding. Larvae unab...

Cannibalism, which is the act of killing and at least partial consumption of conspecifics, is ubiquitous in nature. Mathematical models have considered cannibalism in the predator primarily, and show that predator cannibalism in two species ODE models provides a strong stabilizing effect. There is strong ecological evidence that cannibalism exists among prey as well, yet this phenomenon has bee...

Cannibalism is a very important factor regulating population dynamics of the red flour beetle. After several days of feeding, the flour becomes conditioned by the beetles, which can affect rates of cannibalism. Flour conditioning is caused by an accumulation of feces, pheromones, and ethylquinone, which is a repellent produced by the beetles. We determined the effect of five different levels o...

Aim Kangal dogs, known as guard dogs in many countries of the world, have been found to eat their own puppies during their first 24 h following birth, which is called as maternal cannibalism. Adenosine deaminase (ADA) and xanthine oxidase (XO) are important enzymes for purine metabolism. In this study, the aim is to evaluate ADA and XO activities in Kangal dogs with maternal cannibalism. Mate...

Many animal parents invest heavily to ensure offspring survival, yet some eventually consume some or all of their very own young. This so-called filial cannibalism is known from a wide range of taxa, but its adaptive benefit remains largely unclear. The extent to which parents cannibalize their broods varies substantially not only between species, but also between individuals, indicating that i...

Although cannibalism is ubiquitous in food webs and frequent in systems where a predator and its prey also share a common resource (intraguild predation, IGP), its impacts on species interactions and the dynamics and structure of communities are still poorly understood. In addition, the few existing studies on cannibalism have generally focused on cannibalism in the top-predator, ignoring that ...

Cannibalism is characterized by four aspects: killing victims, gaining energy from victims, size-dependent interactions and intraspecific competition. In this review of mathematical models of cannibalistic populations, we relate the predicted population dynamic consequences of cannibalism to its four defining aspects. We distinguish five classes of effects of cannibalism: (i) regulation of popu...

Infanticide and offspring cannibalism are taxonomically widespread phenomena. In some group-living species, a new dominant individual taking over a group can benefit from infanticide if doing so induces potential mates to become reproductively available sooner. Despite widespread observations of infanticide (i.e. egg cannibalism) among fishes, no study has investigated whether egg cannibalism o...

Fishing spider: evolutionary by-product Sexual cannibalism, per se, need not be adaptive for either sex. In a recent study of the fishing spider, Arnqvist and Henriksson4 argue that sexual cannibalism is a by-product of strong selection for female 'rapacity', or willingness to attack prey items. In this species, female fecundity is determined by the size that the female achieves in her final ju...