Cormorants hunt both benthic (sedentary) and pelagic (motile) prey but it is not known if the energy costs of foraging on these prey differ. We used respirometry to measure the costs of diving in double-crested cormorants (Phalacrocorax auritus) foraging either for sedentary (fish pieces) or motile (juvenile salmon) prey in a deep dive tank. Short dives for sedentary prey were more expensive th...

The authors examine the relative roles of vision and chemoreception and the influence of previous experience with prey on the predatory behavior of Iberian wall lizards (Podarcis hispanica). Experiment 1 compared the responses to visual, chemical, and a combination of visual and chemical cues of a familiar prey by 2 groups of lizards that had been kept in captivity for either 3 months or 21 day...

This paper concerns with a new delayed predator–prey model with stage structure on prey, in which the immature prey and the mature prey are preyed by predator and the delay is the length of the immature stage. Mathematical analysis of the model equations is given with regard to invariance of non-negativity, boundedness of solutions, permanence and global stability and nature of equilibria. Our ...

Spiders of the genus Argyrodes are kleptoparasites that steal prey from other web spiders. Recent studies have shown that in addition to stealing prey, they occasionally eat the silk of the host spider webs. How Argyrodes alters the two foraging tactics in the field is still unknown. The foraging behaviour of Argyrodes flavescens was observed in the south-western part of Japan where prey availa...

Initially, aposematism, which is an unprofitable trait, e.g. noxiousness conspicuously advertised to predators, appears to be a paradox since conspicuousness should increase predation by naive predators. However, reluctance of predators for eating novel prey (e.g. neophobia) might balance the initial predation caused by inexperienced predators. We tested the novelty effects on initial predation...

Foraging theory is increasingly used as a framework to analyze prehistoric resource depression, or declines in prey capture rates that stem from the activities of foragers. Resource depression, with the resulting declines in foraging efŽciency, appears to be an important variable underlying many behavioral transitions in human prehistory. And, while two of the primary lines of evidence used to ...

25 The prey selectivity of fish depends largely on traits of prey and predator. Preferable prey 26 traits might be different for visual predators (such as drift-feeding salmonids) and rather non27 visual predators (such as benthic feeders). We evaluated the explanatory power of five prey 28 traits and prey long-term abundance for the prey selection of small benthivorous fish by 29 analysing the...

BACKGROUND The diet of free-ranging carnivores is an important part of their ecology. It is often determined from prey remains in scats. In many cases, scat analyses are the most efficient method but they require correction for potential biases. When the diet is expressed as proportions of consumed mass of each prey species, the consumed prey mass to excrete one scat needs to be determined and ...

Research on coursing predators has revealed that actions throughout the predatory behavioral sequence (using encounter rate, hunting rate, and kill rate as proxy measures of decisions) drive observed prey preferences. We tested whether similar actions drive the observed prey preferences of a stalking predator, the African lion Panthera leo. We conducted two 96 hour, continuous follows of lions ...