All mammals thus far studied sleep, yet important questions remain concerning the ecological factors that influence sleep patterns. Here, we developed an evolutionary individualbased model to investigate the effect of predation pressure on prey sleep. We investigated three ecological conditions, including one that assumed a dynamic interaction between predator and prey behaviour. In condition 1...

The presence of prey heterogeneity and weakly interacting prey species is frequently viewed as a stabilizer of predator-prey dynamics, countering the destabilizing effects of enrichment and reducing the amplitude of population cycles. However, prior model explorations have largely focused on long-term, dynamic attractors rather than transient dynamics. Recent theoretical work shows that the pre...

Heterogeneity among prey in their susceptibility to predation is a potentially important stabilizer of predator-prey interactions, reducing the magnitude of population oscillations and enhancing total prey population abundance. When microevolutionary responses of prey populations occur at time scales comparable to population dynamics, adaptive responses in prey defense can, in theory, stabilize...

Many studies have demonstrated that the nonconsumptive effect (NCE) of predators on prey traits can alter prey demographics in ways that are just as strong as the consumptive effect (CE) of predators. Less well studied, however, is how the CE and NCE of multiple predator species can interact to influence the combined effect of multiple predators on prey mortality. We examined the extent to whic...

Predator density, refuge availability, and body size of prey can all affect the mortality rate of prey. We assume that more predators will lead to an increase in prey mortality rate, but behavioral interactions between predators and prey, and availability of refuge, may lead to nonlinear effects of increased number of predators on prey mortality rates. We tested for nonlinear effects in prey mo...

Gregarious behavior of potential prey was explained by Hamilton (1971) on the basis of risk-sharing: The probability of being picked up by a predator is small when one makes part of a large aggregate of prey. This argument holds only if the predator chooses its victims at random. It is not the case for herds of evasive prey in the open, where prey's gregarious behavior, favorable for the fast g...

1. Foraging underlies the ability of all animals to acquire essential resources and thus provides a critical link to understand population dynamics. A key issue is how variation in foraging behaviour affects foraging efficiency and predator–prey interactions in spatially heterogeneous environments. However, there is very little quantitative information available on this topic. 2. We evaluated t...

All mammals thus far studied sleep, yet important questions remain concerning the ecological factors that influence sleep patterns. Here, we developed an evolutionary individualbased model to investigate the effect of predation pressure on prey sleep. We investigated three ecological conditions, including one that assumed a dynamic interaction between predator and prey behaviour. In condition 1...

All mammals thus far studied sleep, yet important questions remain concerning the ecological factors that influence sleep patterns. Here, we developed an evolutionary individualbased model to investigate the effect of predation pressure on prey sleep. We investigated three ecological conditions, including one that assumed a dynamic interaction between predator and prey behaviour. In condition 1...