Metacommunity membership is influenced by habitat availability and trophic requirements. However, for multitrophic horizontally transmitted symbiont communities that are closely associated with hosts, symbiont–host interactions may affect criteria in novel ways. For example, failure of beneficial services from symbionts could influence the host, turn, entire community. Understanding such host–s...

Diet of adult pikeperch Sander lucioperca, Eurasian perch Perca fluviatilis, northern pike Esox lucius and European catfish Silurus glanis as top predators in aquatic ecosystems in Serbia was investigated during 2011, in order to understand their relationship to their prey and to investigate their food consumption, feeding and assimilation rate, cannibalism, and habitat segregation. Northern pi...

Learning is crucial to the survival of organisms across their life span, including during embryonic development. We set out to determine when learning becomes possible in amphibian development by exposing spotted salamander (Ambystoma maculatum) embryos to chemical stimuli from a predator (Ambystoma opacum), nonpredator (Lithobates clamitans), or control at developmental stages 16-21 or 36-38 (...

The "kill the winner" hypothesis is an attempt to address the problem of diversity in biology. It argues that host-specific predators control the population of each prey, preventing a winner from emerging and thus maintaining the coexistence of all species in the system. We develop a stochastic model for the kill the winner paradigm and show that the stable coexistence state of the deterministi...

Tabular and linear function approximation based variants of Monte Carlo, temporal difference, and eligibility trace based learning methods are compared in a simple predator-prey grid world from which the prey is able to escape. These methods are compared both in terms of how well they lead a prey agent to escape randomly moving predators, and in terms of how well they do in competition with eac...

Periodic activity generated by the Predator-Prey model. Predator-prey models are argubly the building blocks of the bio-and ecosystems as biomasses are grown out of their resource masses. Species compete, evolve and disperse simply for the purpose of seeking resources to sustain their struggle for their very existence. Depending on their specific settings of applications, they can take the form...

Abstract Mating signals of insects do not only attract their intended receivers but also eavesdropping parasites and/or predators. As a result, an arms race between the host or prey and eavesdropper ensues, propelling co‐evolution potentially contributing to diversification. Here, we investigate species interaction fly Ormia lineifrons that uses Neoconocephalus katydids as hosts for its lethal ...

Learning complex behaviour is a difficult task for any artificial agent. Decomposing a task into multiple sub-tasks, learning the sub-tasks separately, and then learning to use them as a whole is a natural way to reduce the dimensionality and complexity of the task function. This approach is demonstrated on a predator agent in the predator-prey-hunter domain. This extended domain has a new agen...

In this paper, a new stage structured prey-predator model with linear functional response is proposed and studied. The stages for prey have been considered. The proposed mathematical model consists of three nonlinear ordinary differential equations to describe the interaction among juvenile prey, adult prey and predator populations. The model is analyzed by using linear stability analysis to ob...